The engineers did their work. Perry didn’t have much to do, which was deeply irritating. The portal was closed, and that meant the only way off the planet was either a new portal or the repair of the Farfinder’s main drive. Perry was bouncing between those options in his mind like an anxious kangaroo, and neither option was actually within his control.
He’d visited Nima on the first day, then again on the second, and by the fifth it was something of an established pattern with them. He felt bad for her, because she, like him, was in a losing position with nothing to do.
“She still doesn’t want to fight me?” asked Nima. “Because I would fight her.” She laid on her bed while he sat in a chair. She’d been wearing less with each successive day, though he didn’t know whether that was an attempt to allure him, because she was growing more comfortable with him, or simply her whim. She was still wearing more than the elves of this world, but there was a way that she arranged her legs that couldn’t have been just happenstance.
He wasn’t enough of an idiot to make a move on her. If she was trying to entice him, it wouldn’t work.
“It’s not Mette that’s the problem,” said Perry. “It’s that if the two of you are going to fight, then the reason is going to be because we’re hoping for a portal to open. And if it does open, then we have only a limited amount of time with it. So the fight isn’t going to happen until we’re good and ready, unfortunately.”
“You should be letting me help with the project,” said Nima. “I’m good with computers.”
“We’re not risking it,” said Perry. “Sorry.”
He had come into her room with his armor off, mostly to make her feel more at home, which she didn’t.
“You should have let me go through the portal when the opportunity was there,” said Nima. “Or were you planning this mock fight all along?”
If Perry was being honest, he would have told her that in all the excitement, they had sort of forgotten about her. Not completely, but enough that they weren’t thinking about what she would want. She was a prisoner, and her rights and whims had not entered into it.
“We need every tool in the toolbox,” said Perry.
She only nodded. “I’m at your mercy.”
“Even if the portal opens, you don’t need to go through it,” said Perry. “You can probably stay aboard the ship, get dropped off on the next world. I don’t think they want you as a permanent prisoner. And if you cross to the next world on this ship, rather than through a portal, I think it should sever your link to the Grand Spell, at least in theory. They carry no magic with them.”
She touched the pendant that rested on her chest.
“We don’t have a portal to bring you through,” said Perry. “Not unless we decide to have you fight Mette, and if you fight, it’s going to be as safe as it can be while still triggering the portal to appear.” How to do that was an open question.
“I’m ready when she is,” said Nima.
“Is it the fighting you want, even after all this?” asked Perry. “Is that why you want a portal?”
“The fighting?” asked Nima. “No. Or …”
“Or?” asked Perry.
“What I want is to go home, if there’s still a home there,” said Nima. “But failing that, I’d like to prove myself in a way that I haven’t done, not a single time since I’ve been in this world. I beat your clone in an unfair fight, and I don’t think I could do that a second time.”
“Probably not, no,” said Perry. “But the fight wouldn’t be fair.”
“The portals promise a fair fight,” said Nima. “Don’t they?”
“I don’t think they promise anything,” said Perry. “I’ve come around to the idea that they just are. This whole planet has been a clusterfuck.” She raised an eyebrow, not offended, just curious. “A, uh, wildly complicated problem for everyone.”
“In my world, group sex is quite regimented,” she offered.
Perry let that hang there for a moment. “The problem with a fair fight is that you might die,” said Perry. “What you should want is a stacked fight, one that you couldn’t dream of losing.”
“Is that what you want?” asked Nima.
“I think at a certain level it becomes unsporting,” said Perry. “There’s no thrill in victory when your opponent is a toddler.”
“I’ll elect not to take offense,” said Nima.
“You know what I mean though,” said Perry. “If I’m going to fight, I want a challenge, but a challenge that I can rise to, one that I can beat. And of course the fight isn’t the point of it, —”
“Says who?” asked Nima. “The portals seem to think the fight is the point.”
“We don’t know who made the Grand Spell, or why,” said Perry. “And even if we knew who made them, what’s their authority? That they knew how to make something that we don’t?”
“You said you’ve come around to the idea that the portals just are?” asked Nima. “I’ve come around to a very different idea, the idea that they were made by our betters. And it’s not our place to question them.”
“Are you serious?” asked Perry.
Nima shrugged. “I might be.”
“So that’s a ‘no’ then,” said Perry.
“I was taught not to question my place,” said Nima. “I valued that, only now I don’t know what my place is, except as prisoner on this infernal ship. So yes, there’s a power higher than any of us that made the Grand Spell, and it wants me to fight, wants me to win, and is fine with discarding me if I cannot or will not fulfill that purpose.”
“I can’t tell if you’re taking the piss or not,” said Perry.
“I’m serious about going through the portal again, if we can get one,” said Nima. “I’ll beat Mette to a pulp if that’s what it takes.”
Perry shook his head and changed the topic, asking her about some element of her culture, the way that art and music worked, which was something they’ve discussed in the past. That was enough to eat up more time, allowing Perry to not pace back and forth while trying his best to stay out of the way of the engineers.
Nima seemed to be in a better mood when he left, which was at least something.
The Farfinder had been reconfigured in the days following Fenilor’s exit. The engineers worked in teams, which had become larger now that they’d started picking up people from the science cities. The engines had been repaired, and while the magic doors still weren’t working and might never work again, they could simply fly wherever they needed to go. They had three of Moss and two Dirks, and essentially the whole of the world had been alerted to their plight, or at least that tiny fraction that could actually do anything about it. There were a few other engineers walking around, none that Perry knew personally, though Marchand could whisper their names in his ear if need be.
Dirk was in a command room, biting his nails, and looked relieved when Perry came in.
“How’s our prisoner?” he asked.
“She’s the Farfinder’s prisoner,” said Perry. “But she’s fine. What’s the word from the teams?”
“Bah,” said Dirk. He turned back to what the monitors were showing, mostly logs of activities from the different teams. “They’re stalled out on power requirements for the wiggler, which is insane given how much energy this ship has access to. They’re trying to build a larger version with better precision so the costs aren’t so high, but that’s going to take time.”
“Mmm,” said Perry. “That was more or less where they were two hours ago.”
“I offered to commandeer a city’s golden domes,” said Dirk. “Consensus is that it won’t help. The domes aren’t good at raw energy output, not the kind that we need. So then I offered effluence, a pair of enormous lanterns that we’ve been keeping around, but retrofit on those is going to take time.”
“Do you need me to get it rolling?” asked Perry.
“No,” said Dirk. “I handled that this morning.”
They had global communication now, thanks to the Farfinder and some hacked-together equipment. The bandwidth was pitiful, but the only computers were the ones that the Farfinder had brought with them, so there was no need to shove huge amounts of data through the limited satellites. Dirk was in contact with his clones the whole world over, but there wasn’t all that much that could be done to work the problem, not when the expertise was so incredibly limited. They had pulled in some mathematicians specializing in higher dimensions, but while math was “the same” across worlds, the terminology wasn’t, and hacking together a shared understanding involved a lot of overhead even with Marchand translating.
“So we’re just sitting here with our thumbs up our asses,” said Perry. “Our fate is in the hands of the brainiacs.”
“I hate it,” said Dirk. The command center was mostly ceremonial, not actually used for project management. The screens showed the teams, but represented by blobs, since no one was going to spend the time getting video set up. “There’s gotta be a way to make it go faster.”
“I think we have to accept that it’s not about us,” said Perry.
“You think this is ego?” asked Dirk, looking at him. “Perry, this is the world we’re talking about, and if I trust the brainiacs — and I trust Moss, in all his incarnations, at least — then this is the most important thing I’m ever going to do. And what I’m doing is nothing, just standing in this room and complaining.”
“They’ll solve it or they won’t,” said Perry. He felt a lump in his throat in spite of the nonchalance.
“Another two of the prospects went through,” said Dirk. “Did you see that?”
“I did,” said Perry. “Two more gone to different worlds, that’s good for us, that’s more data.”
“Feh,” said Dirk. “It’s a clock.”
“It might be enough to give us an early warning system,” said Perry. “Some change in the readings that shows when it’s going to happen.”
“They’re getting there,” said Dirk. “But what we really need is … I don’t know.”
“Go on, say it,” said Perry.
“A way to stop him in his tracks,” said Dirk. “That sap-for-brains is in stasis, right? And we’re here with all the tools of a dozen worlds, and all the power that this one can provide. And can’t we just, I don’t know, shoot him?”
“Did you suggest that to the teams?” asked Perry with a smirk.
“No, I didn’t fucking suggest it to the teams, I know it’s stupid, I know that he’s beyond the skin of the universe, or past the first layer of skin, or something like that.” Dirk heaved a sigh. “But if we could just shoot him, that’s what we would want to do. He’s in a pocket somewhere, right?”
“Presumably,” said Perry. “I mean … pocket is probably not the correct term. I would guess it’s information encoding, I guess, some pattern of him that’s been etched by the spell, not like there’s some actual timeless prison made of glass he’s stuck inside or whatever. Or it might be that he is frozen in time, but that it’s some kind of, I don’t know, hyperspace warping thing going on. When we go through there’s no sensation of travel. Richter thought it was possible that the portal was purely informational, especially because of how traversal works. You stick your hand in and don’t feel anything on the other side.”
Dirk looked over the screens. “What are our odds sitting at?”
Perry resisted the urge to roll his eyes. They had no way of knowing. Maybe some people on the teams could give an assessment, but from what Perry had learned, the Eggys would lean optimist and the Mettes would lean pessimist, and the Mosses were far enough diverged from one another that they might be split. “Fifty-fifty,” said Perry.
“I mean of the gun thing working,” said Dirk. “Or not a gun, but something like a gun, a way to attack him, kill him from a distance.”
“Oh,” said Perry. “Then still fifty-fifty. I don’t know, you know I don’t know.”
“Just talking,” said Dirk.
Hella came into the room and took a seat in front of the monitors. “How are we today, boys?”
“Just talking,” said Dirk. “Thinking about the odds, the needs of the teams, how likely this is to all just end ignobly and with very little warning.”
“They’re working hard,” said Hella. “How has the hunt for a working cloning machine gone?”
“Poorly,” said Dirk. “We didn’t have them in great supply, so it’s a question of parts and expertise. Moss has the expertise, but then it’s a question of time. Lots of metal in the machine, all of it precision, and that means fabrication time. We’ve got people working on it.”
Fenilor had destroyed the machine on the Farfinder, but he had also destroyed the other machines as well, striking at the places they were kept. His reasons for doing this were opaque, since they couldn’t possibly have offered any advantage in the fight with Perry. Maybe he saw them as a threat to the order of the world somehow, an advancement that would cause the whole scheme to crumble in his absence, but he hadn’t done enough to destroy the knowledge of the machines. To do that he would have had to kill dozens of the right people in the right places, then burn all their research. He probably could have done it, if he had wanted to.
Perry wondered how many people you would need to kill in order to completely collapse semiconductor fabrication back on Earth. Probably a lot, but that was because they were a linchpin of modern society.
“Nine women can’t make a baby in a single month,” said Perry.
They both looked at him.
“It’s a software thing,” said Perry. “Richter said it. Or it’s … a general organizational principle. How much are the clones actually going to help? How many more of Moss actually helps to solve the extant problems faster?”
“That’s a call for our project manager to make,” said Hella. “But I would guess that we’re already nearly at capacity. There’s organizational overhead already. There are limits to the parallelization we can employ. We need more power, but —“
“Already worked that problem as much as I can,” said Dirk. “There’s a retrofit going, should be finished shortly. All the energy you could want, and we just need to sear a piece of the planet with effluence to do it.”
“We do?” asked Perry. “You didn’t mention that. And if it’s a retrofit, then do we have a candidate lantern far enough from civilization?”
“We don’t,” said Dirk. “But one’s been selected. There’s an evacuation now, ten thousand people displaced. Last one out is a rotten egg.”
“All those families,” said Perry. “Those houses, you’re talking about a whole city.”
“Just a town. It’s the entire reason that Global Command Authorities exist,” said Dirk. “Had to be done, if it shaves us a day off our deadline. The facility is huge, one of a kind.”
“Can I help?” asked Perry. “I can fly, I have the shelf.”
“You can help, if you want to,” said Dirk. “But we’ve had drills in place. The evacuation should go smoothly.”
“You’re underestimating me,” said Perry. “You don’t realize the breadth of what I can do, where I can see.”
“I’m not underestimating you,” said Dirk. “I’m thinking about the costs and the problems. You traipse off for a day to help some poor souls move with only what they have on their backs, and then what happens if Fenilor comes back? That’s one of the scenarios. You’re not here when that happens, our odds go way down, and we need to get him while we can.”
“I’m going anyway,” said Perry. “In the event that we can reverse the process, dump him in this world, they’ll wait on me to do that, and better, wait until we have a plan of attack. And if there’s a rush to do it — which there would be, I know, I know — then calling me back is just a matter of hours, depending on where the site is.”
“It’s the end of the world, Perry,” said Dirk. “You understand that, right?”
“It’s the end of the world and we’re cooped up in here with nothing to contribute, nothing to add,” said Perry. “I know you feel it too, because it’s all you talk about. So I’m going to take the opportunity to go save the lives of a few thousand people, and it won’t matter in the scheme of things, but at least it’ll be something worthwhile, rather than staring at these screens and praying.”
“Fine,” said Dirk with a wave of his hand. “If you’ve got a map handy, I can mark it for you, but there’s a good chance we’ll need you here sooner than later.”
Perry looked to Hella. “Captain, permission to disembark?”
Hella rolled her eyes. “Granted. We’ll swing the ship around and go there in a day or so, once the follow-up engine work is done.”
Perry did, in fact, have a map on hand, since Marchand was partially integrated with the ship’s systems. Once the location was marked, Perry got his power armor on and went to the airlock. The ship was still badly damaged, and would be for the foreseeable future, though they were at least getting some help from the culture.
Behind the scenes, Dirk and Hella had a series of talks, and Hella had apparently gone to speak in front of one of the Global Command Authorities, the day before. The ship was complicated, with parts from various different worlds, but it was in theory replicable, and it blew the airships away in terms of capabilities. It was the kind of disruption and society-changing technology that the culture wasn’t always on board with, but they would at least have to assemble a panel and decide whether or not to pursue it.
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The parallelism of it all felt odd to Perry. Committees were meeting to talk about future technologies while the world was at risk, and yes, no one on those committees could meaningfully contribute to the work the engineers were doing. Still, pretending that the crisis wasn’t happening felt wrong somehow, even if it was objectively correct.
He had time to think as he flew toward the town of St. Durbin.
He tried to direct his thoughts to the future, just like the committee members were doing, but it was difficult, because the opaque work of the engineers was what was actually important. Thoughts about the future might bear fruit though, if he didn’t die.
Assuming that Fenilor could be stopped or killed or otherwise prevented from punching a hole straight through the world, Perry would continue on. Maybe that would be by taking the portal that came after Nima and Mette fought, but if that didn’t work, then he’d have another opponent in a few years. He would do what Fenilor had done and find a place where they could fight without imperiling anyone else.
But then there would be another world, with its own difficulties, and it would all be different, because the Farfinder wasn’t just an expedition anymore, it was attempting to help the culture set up multiversal trade and cooperation, at least in theory. They would follow Perry, something that was apparently going to be easier now that they had new mapping technology, and if Hella kept her end of the bargain, they would aim for a return to Earth 2, mostly in hopes of having a reasonable trading partner. The punches were uni-directional, but that didn’t preclude using a cycle of them, and if they could do that, then universes could be in communication with each other.
Perry had been functionally useless on the Natrix, handling some scouting and occasional work, but not ever feeling like he was pulling his weight. And he was useless now, too, waiting on the engineers to solve the damned thing. But a great stretch of uselessness lay before him, years of it. He had become better at fighting than anything else, but there wasn’t always someone to fight.
The thoughts rattled around until he put on some “in-flight entertainment”, one of the anime shows from Richter he’d seen twice before, this one about a group of tweenage costumed crime fighters called the Critter Crew. Flying with the sword was generally just about keeping at the correct heading, and that only took a fraction of his attention.
St. Durbin was a smaller city than he’d thought it would be, just a single golden dome, and a half-sized one at that. They were on a river, but not a major one. The buildings had flat tops with complicated gutters to empty out the rain, and then the streets had larger gutters to funnel rainwater down into the canal. Maybe that was the style through this whole region, but Perry hadn’t done an architecture survey. He should have, he thought, because that would have been a better use of his time than bugging Nima or watching the teams on the monitors.
He landed in the center of the town, where people were already gathered, and it appeared that evacuation efforts were already underway. His descent was greeted with a clamor of attention, but less than he’d thought there would be, maybe because they had giant robots taller than him, or because they had other excitement to worry about. The world was on the brink, but this town was even more on the brink.
“I’m here to help,” said Perry to a man with a clipboard and an armband.
That got him some blank stares, not just from the man he was talking to, but everyone else around them.
“I can ferry people wherever they need to go,” said Perry. He opened the shelf-space by way of demonstration. It was freshly cleaned and stocked, though there was plenty of room for people, at least a hundred of them if they didn’t need to be in there long. “I can outpace an airship.”
That got the attention of the man. “If I line them up, you can take them?”
“Yes,” said Perry. “Show me on a map where I’m going, but I can run at a hundred miles an hour. Anyone who’s ready, and whatever they can carry, or however you’re doing things.”
The units were translated, naturally, and that got him some wide eyes. It was a bold claim to make, and only true in the best of circumstances, which they certainly wouldn’t have unless Perry was traveling down a very flat, very clear road.
The line took some time to form, but it was long, and the first trip wouldn’t lack for passengers. The first volunteers were intrepid, but it was a good deal, because the other option seemed to be getting on a caravan of farm vehicles pulling open trailers, and it was threatening to rain. The entire evacuation was meant to happen quickly, but Perry didn’t see any way that they were actually going to accomplish it in the timescale they had, not without him. Maybe there were airships incoming, but those had limits too.
They were all destined for the largest city that was close by, a place with nearly a million people. How a city could absorb that many people was being left for someone there, but it seemed perilous to Perry, a serious logistical problem that had simply been sprung on them earlier in the day. The culture built with extra housing, extra capacity, storehouses of clothes, but he wasn’t sure that they overbuilt that much, not when overbuilding put strain on the workers.
Running was a thrill. It was completely different from going fast in a car, and it took attention that the sword didn’t. Perry had to watch his steps and react swiftly to what was on the road, because a tumble could hurt him, even if the armor was designed to protect him. He found himself drawing on his heightened senses, attempting to slow time and speed up his reactions. There wasn’t a reason to run as fast as he was, not when he was spending so much energy and effort to fight against air resistance, but he went fast anyhow, with leaping strides that left small divots in the road.
The city had the same architectural style as the town did, except that the taller buildings eschewed it, and they were obviously using different materials. Perry slowed considerably, not wanting to kill some hapless pedestrian, and then was left with the task of finding someone he could hand his passengers off to. The whole trip had taken a half hour, if that, so he wasn’t worried about getting them out just yet.
He stopped at a large cathedral with tents in front of it, and went to the nearest person with an armband he could find. He was getting looks, of course, but he was used to that.
“I’m here to drop off refugees from St. Durbin’s,” he said.
“Drop off?” asked the woman with the armband. She was an elf, which seemed like a common species in this place. The armband was the only thing she was wearing on her upper body.
“With magic, an Implement,” said Perry. “If I leave them here, with you, can you handle them, or find someone who can? Get them to where they need to be, housing and clothing and food?”
“I … yes,” said the woman.
Perry opened up the shelf without further ado.
“Time to come out,” he said. “Orderly line, keep it moving.” Next time he would deputize someone to keep the peace, if they wouldn’t just do that on their own. Ten people could be selected from the hundred to organize and make sure that everyone was ready.
It took time for them to file out of the shelf, but they came out quicker than they came in, likely because they were more motivated. The shelf could get claustrophobic in a hurry, with no possible way to leave. There was a chamber pot, but he hoped that no one had cause to use it during the short trip.
When the last person was out, Perry snapped the shelf shut.
“I’m going to get more,” he said. “I’ll be back in forty minutes. Set up a system for getting people out of here quickly, I don’t want to have to slow down. We’re trying to evacuate ten thousand people in two days, which is a tall order.”
The elf nodded, but she looked slightly green. Perry had the sense that this was more responsibility than she’d wanted since she’d woken up that morning.
Then Perry was off again, racing back out of the city and then down the road.
That’s one percent done.
It was more than a drop in the bucket, but if he was doing this by himself, working non-stop, it would take four days rather than two. The enormous lantern building near the town was being converted by experts, and at least one team from the ship would be there shortly to install the larger sensor/wiggler. Perry wasn’t sure whether they would turn it on with people still close by, but he imagined that was a strong possibility. The culture was all about the greater good and close cooperation, but he didn’t know if that extended to spilling the blood of unwitting civilians who couldn’t get away in time.
When he returned to St. Durbin, they were more ready for him. Another hundred people had been lined up, and they filed through swiftly. There was also an airship, which was taking more like four hundred on it, clearly running at capacity.
“How many do we have left?” Perry asked the man with the clipboard as he waited for people to file through.
“Hard to say, no census,” the man replied. “And there will be hold outs. We have authorization to remove them by force, if necessary. Plus a few of the thywins.”
“That what?” asked Perry.
“They’re, ah,” said the man. “Their own group, don’t speak the language, not sure they understand what’s going on. Thywins, elves, but of their own caste. Not really of the culture as much as the rest of us. We’ll need a translator.”
“I’m a translator,” said Perry.
“You don’t know what a thywin is, but you speak their language?” asked the man.
“Yes,” said Perry. “But I’ll get the people who are ready first.”
The trips took time, and there were limits to how fast Perry could run, even after he’d optimized his path on the road, and even after they had a better system for getting people into and out of the shelf. By the fourth time, it was a nice flow, a non-stop movement of people in and people out, save for the elderly and infirm, or the people with children, who did slow things down a bit. Perry wanted to say to them that every minute they wasted was a minute that meant one of their neighbors couldn’t get out in time, but he didn’t actually know whether Dirk or someone else would make the call to turn the machine on before the evacuation was complete.
The afternoon slipped into the evening, and then into night. They would be working around the clock to get everyone out. Perry was trying to keep track in his head, ticking down a percent whenever he finished a trip, ticking down five percent for every airship he saw come and go — not too many of them. When night fell, the airships had to tether down, which meant that Perry was the only one moving people, another hundred every hour or so. He told them he could go through the night, and the people of the town grudgingly lined up for him to wait their turn. The systems were refined, and by three in the morning, there was an orderly queue of exactly as many people as could fit inside the shelf space, lined up and ready to go.
Running took enough of his attention that he didn’t have time to think. There was moonlight in this part of the world, enough that he could regenerate energy, though the downtime while he waited for people to file in and out also let the reactor charge the batteries.
He was on the return trip to St. Durbin when day broke, and when he arrived there, he saw that there were less than fifty people waiting for him. The man with the clipboard and armband that had been gathering people in the square had long been replaced by a different, identical man with a clipboard and armband, and Perry suspected that they would just keep rotating them until the evacuation was complete. There was an entire team, but this was the singular point of contact for Perry, the only person he actually interacted with. Helpers went among those who were waiting, delivering water and food for them, but that was always quickly resolved as Perry showed up.
“We’re light?” he asked.
“This is everyone that’s ready, everyone that’s ready to come,” said the new man with the clipboard. “The rest are the holdouts, thywin, you know, people who don’t want to leave and don’t understand what it’s going to be like.”
“I was told you needed a translator,” said Perry. “Or … someone who can speak the language and also wants to argue against staying?”
“We do,” he said. “This is the last group, but there are two more airships coming back, to take supplies. If you think you can talk some sense into the thywin,” he looked at the line of people who were ready to go. “It’s up to you, I guess. We can wait.”
“I’ll go,” said Perry. “Point the way.”
Without much trouble, Perry went to the edge of the city and found a group of elves standing together outside a collection of houses. There were other people there, all with armbands, part of the volunteer task force that had been tasked with helping along the evacuation. Some of the people in armbands were ones he had seen before, and Marchand displayed their names. The attention was focused here, on this crisis, now that the city had been largely emptied. Overhead, another airship was returning.
“I’m here to translate,” said Perry. He stepped forward to the tallest of the elves, who was wearing only a codpiece — not just traditional elven immodesty, but a statement of some kind, a way of setting him even further apart. Behind him, the houses were different, without the flat roofs and elaborate gutter system. Instead, they had sodden thatch, in spite of the fact that it hadn’t rained the night before. “I speak your language.” The intent flowed out from Perry, solidifying the words as he spoke them.
“Then tell them to go,” said the elf. “We are not moving. We moved once, when we were forced from our homes, and have made a new home. They have said that they decided to activate the machine at the edge of this city, built far away, a machine they said they would use only in an emergency. We weren’t asked.” His words flowed like water. The language had a fluidity to it, and barely any pause between words. There was something about how they were linked together that gave them cadence.
“No one was asked,” said Perry. “The Global Command Authority made the decision.”
“That is not the culture,” said the elf.
“It is,” said Perry. “It’s part of the paradox of community. Every community looks out for itself first and foremost, which means that no community can be trusted to volunteer itself for destruction.”
Perry was, at least, well-appraised of how the culture viewed itself. He’d spent some time reading books, or having Marchand read to him, and sometimes he just got the relevant summaries if the book was especially repetitive or long-winded.
“So we have been ‘volunteered’,” said the elf. “Our houses will be destroyed if we do not move, we will be killed by the very effluence that the culture has promised that it would eliminate and contain?”
“The fate of the world depends on it,” said Perry. “It must be done swiftly.” He hesitated. He knew the next line in the cultural script, since he’d heard it often enough while waiting on the people evacuating. He wasn’t sure that it would work though. “It’s the nature of living in the culture that you own very little. Clothes and furniture come from libraries, they’re borrowed. These houses were built for the good of the community, they’re not property, they’re not owned, they have only the ownership that comes through habitation.”
The elf frowned at this, but didn’t seem as offended as Perry would have been. “These houses were built with help, this is true. But we would have done it ourselves, if we had known they would be taken away.”
“More houses can be built,” said Perry. “More houses will be built. There will be recompense for everything you’ve lost here, as much as recompense is possible.” From the swirling rumors, Perry thought that there would simply be little that the culture could do. They could give people some of the secondary currency, but housing, clothing, and food were already free.
“How can they make recompense for the loss of our home?” asked the elf.
“They cannot,” said Perry.
The elf stayed rooted where he was. “Then we will not leave.”
“Then you’ll die,” said Perry. “The lantern is going on whether you’re here or not.” He was relatively sure that was true. The stakes were simply too high. “If you act now, we’ll help you remove these people, save them from that fate. We will move any sacred objects, any ritual ornaments. But that takes time, time which you’re wasting.”
The elf wavered. He must have been doing this for a while.
Perry wasn’t sure how bad the lantern would actually be. It was a huge building, but it was quite far away. If it was actually capable of scouring the ground with effluence, then Perry figured it would probably tear itself apart, and his hunch, without talking to anyone, was that it was much more like radiation levels that caused a huge spike in cancer levels, rather than radiation levels that caused skin to melt off.
“There are cocoons,” said the elf. “Only a handful, but they would need to be moved, gently. We won’t leave them behind. We’d rather die.”
“If they can be moved, we’ll move them,” said Perry.
“They’re delicate. An airship may be too rocky. If they can be moved without one … we will abandon this home.” The elf looked utterly defeated. All his verve was gone.
“If they can be detached, I can move them without any trouble.” Perry opened up the shelf, showing it off, though the floors were less clean than they’d been before the flows of people in and out.
The elf began speaking to his people. He was their leader, apparently, which wasn’t the culture. In theory, they should have assembled an ad hoc symboulion of some kind, but they simply listened to the elf with the codpiece and began to take things out of their homes, clothes and kitchenware, along with a few pieces of furniture. It was more moving day than evacuation, but one of the airships landed near them, and it didn’t seem that Perry would have to do too much more than haul the cocoons.
Likely the thywin had been wavering even before Perry got there, making a last stand as a way of saving face and airing grievances, but it made him feel good to have done something, or to feel like he’d done something.
He helped with the cocoons, which were surprisingly heavy, and they were eventually lined up within the shelf, a dozen of them in all, more than he would have thought there would be. They were more soft to the touch than he had thought they would be, more like canvas stretched over sticks, like there was some internal spiny structure.
It took time, but the countdown wasn’t even particularly close. Perry delivered the cocoons, helped them out and into a waiting building, then raced back to St. Durbin a final time.
The last airship was still loading people, but mostly everyone was milling about.
“We’re ready to call it done,” said one of the men in armbands.
It was mostly people in armbands now. They had a hospital, which had been emptied, and all the children were accounted for, but it still set Perry on edge, knowing how little surveillance they had. The culture was not big on keeping track of its people, and that meant if you had to move an entire town, someone could more easily be left behind. Not that Perry would have trusted the United States to competently do a full evacuation either.
“I’m going to do a final sweep,” said Perry. “Just to check whether there’s anyone who slept through all this. I might make some noise while I do that, hope that’s okay.”
“Men in masks have been by,” said the man. “They can see through walls, more or less.”
“Still,” said Perry. “Some child hiding in a basement because they don’t know what’s going on?”
The man in the armband nodded. “Do you need us to wait for you?”
“No,” said Perry. He lifted up from the ground. “I’ll leave on my own. If I do end up finding anyone, I’ll grab them and bring them to safety.”
But before he did that, Perry took a moment to look around at the people in their armbands. Most of them were local, he had surmised, people who hadn’t known the day before that this was what they were going to be doing. They were volunteers, helping the people of their town, local symboulion leaders. There was something Perry found slightly off-putting about the community, and while he could appreciate their rapid response, especially when it was difficult to communicate the “why” of the matter, there was also something uncanny about it. He supposed they knew about the great machine outside their town, and had more forewarning, but still. Jumping to help with the destruction didn’t sit right with him. He didn’t suppose that he would have fought, in their place, but perhaps he would have.
The airship lifted off while Perry was circling the town. He was, in theory, alone, flying through the air in a spiral. He started up a blaringly loud alarm from the suit’s speakers, along with flashing lights, instructing in the multiple local languages that the town was going to be bombarded with effluence, that this was the last chance to escape. Marchand was using the alarm for echolocation, mapping the town as comprehensively as possible, using the lulls in the alarm to map the interiors of different buildings.
If there was anyone left, they didn’t come out.
When the spiral was finished, Perry did a second one, this one faster, on the ground, looking for anyone he could possibly have missed. If this had been any town in America, he figured there would have been stragglers, holdouts, people left behind and forgotten. Maybe that was cynicism. Maybe America would have done just as well, if faced with the same scenario. It took an outrageous faith in government though, it seemed to Perry, a unanimity of purpose, a culture that was built for this sort of action.
It was enviable, in a way, but he would have screamed if he’d been trapped inside it.
When he had assured himself that he wasn’t going to find anyone else, Perry flew out from the city, to the tower. It was a tall, immaculately constructed building, relatively new, ugly and utilitarian, but clean. The upper levels were wrapped in the same gold the domes used, for unclear reasons.
One of the Mettes was standing on a balcony, on the outside, and she waved him down. Perry wished that they did more to distinguish themselves, and he couldn’t immediately tell which one this was.
“We’re just about to start,” she said. “Another hour, maybe two.”
“Is this safe?” asked Perry.
“Not even a little,” said the Mette. “We’re going to evacuate, get readings remotely. In theory there are systems inside this thing that will allow us to prevent effluence from hitting the core, where the power will go. It’s largely untested.”
“What was this thing going to be for?” asked Perry.
“Just a little treat tucked into the back pocket of the Global Command Authority,” said the Mette. “The amount of funding they’re working with is insane. The scope of some of these projects, especially projects with no real end in sight, no clear purpose. And for a society that’s always trying to reel in science and engineering, trying to keep up a stasis.”
“They’ve been on a war footing,” said Perry. “Maybe that will change.”
“Scary to have a weapon like this,” said the Mette. “Not that they conceived of it as a weapon, necessarily, but …”
“But it could be one,” said Perry. “It’s high-powered.”
The Mette nodded.
“Give me a ring when you need a lift out of here,” he said.
“The ship is nearby,” said the Mette. “But thank you.”
Again he had that feeling of wanting to be helpful, but being unable, so he simply drifted up and away, waiting for this great lantern to start up. Really he could just go to the ship, take off the armor, and kick back.
Instead, he stayed there, hovering, waiting.
It was a full hour later when the building started issuing an alarm. Perry watched as the Farfinder came down and extracted the skeleton crew inside the building, both those from the Farfinder and those who had almost surely been working there through the night.
When they cleared out, there was no one but Perry around for at least thirty miles.
“Sir, we should clear out,” said Marchand.
“I want to see it,” said Perry. “The effluence has a travel speed, we can outpace it.”
“We cannot measure it, sir,” said Marchand. “We would be relying on visual indicators only.”
“Send a message to the Farfinder,” said Perry. “Ask for their expertise.”
“I have already taken the liberty of doing so,” said Marchand. “Hella has advised that it is unlikely that you will suffer, so long as you retreat from the effluence as it becomes apparent.”
“You disagree then?” asked Perry.
“I think it is an undue risk,” said Marchand. “Sir, you and this armor are too important for even a small risk. Nevermind that the worst case scenario is death, there are less worse cases that might nevertheless prove disastrous for far more people than yourself.”
“I want to see it,” said Perry. He wasn’t in the mood for discussion. “Computer, end conversation.”
“Very well, sir, if you insist,” replied Marchand. “But I’m afraid my warnings will get quite shrill if you tarry in your retreat.”
Perry wasn’t thrilled with Marchand insisting on getting the last word in, but his irritation was swept away when the lantern started working.
It took some time to build up, then swept across the ground, practically crawling from his position in the sky, but still fast enough that a person wouldn’t be able to outrun it. The effluence itself was invisible, but its effects were not. There were bursts of color through the surrounding trees and brush as changes took place, fires that flared up and died down, small explosions of glass and rising plumes of smoke. A dead bird appeared in the air in freefall, and a school of fish flopped uselessly on the ground. As the interior machinery of the building picked up speed, the changes happened faster, and the surrounding area rumbled. Trees fell, bits of them turned metal or stone, and more fires caught. One of the trees grew three times its size in an instant, falling over as its roots could no longer support it. It was more destructive, much faster than Perry had expected it to be, and he flew away, watching it the entire time.
Raw, wild magic pulsed out into the world, destroying and mutating everything in its wake with no regard for the order of nature.
There was something beautiful about it, in a way.