Worldwielder, p.11
Worldwielder, page 11
And then she did, a frigid gulp making its way down her throat. Odd was everything that made her different. She nodded.
They entered the room, which was filled with armed guards. A pudgy-faced man with bloodshot eyes sat behind a desk and read from an interminable list of queries. He already knew Ringo, so most of the questions were directed at Melissa—where she was from, what worlds she'd been to, why she was here. The guards searched her backpack several times.
Finally, when it seemed every possible angle of interrogation had been exhausted, she and Ringo were told they'd be allowed in. “Welcome to Fazaar,” the pudgy-faced man said, waving them along.
From the questioning room, Melissa expected they would enter some kind of underground facility with cramped rooms and archaic furnishings, so she couldn't have been more surprised by the sight that met her beyond the next door.
An underground cavern, miles wide, high, and long, stretched out below. A staircase snaked down its side. Its floor was dominated by a city unlike any she'd ever seen, its buildings a pastiche of styles and times. There were skyscrapers of steel and sparkling lights, pagodas of stucco and a hundred colors, tents embellished with the images of strange beasts and battles, buildings that looked like Aztec temples and giant beehives, mansions with sprawling gardens and mellifluous fountains, terraced domiciles carved into rock walls, and a thousand other foreign structures. Glowing cerulean waterways crisscrossed the metropolis. Strings of car-sized lanterns hung from the cavern's roof. Winged creatures and flying craft milled about in its upper reaches. A thousand sounds of unrecognizable origin echoed off its walls, forming an exotic and curiously beautiful song of the city. Masses of life forms clogged its arteries, some human, some alien, some machine.
It was everything, all in one place. It was something out of a dream, but more, better. It was a sensory overload, to Melissa especially. As they neared the bottom of the staircase, the sensation of thousands of minds scratched at her. She'd never been around so many people in so dense a space, let alone people with minds this strange. Walking through the city, it was all she could do to put one foot in front of the other and keep the back of Ringo's coat in her line of sight. When she did look away, to glance at shops like The Aegis Arsenal or ogle two-headed monsters and walking corpses, the tumult and nimiety threatened to drown her.
“Is it all… real?” she mumbled to Ringo at one point.
Somehow, he heard her over the din. “Of course it is. Everything you can imagine is real on some world. There's enough of them, that's for sure.”
At last they turned off the crowded thoroughfares and into a more run-down, thinly trafficked section of the city. On a dusty side street, they stopped before their destination—a single-level shop whose wooden sign read Psu-Tem: Galliographer.
Inside, the shop was silent, a welcome change from the bedlam without. Shelves on the walls were lined with tomes as old as they were thick. Most were covered in dust. There was a table and a doorway at the back of the room, but no people.
Which was why Melissa was so startled by the voice that emanated from the vicinity of the counter. “Visitors! I say!”
Then she saw it. Sitting atop the counter, cute as a newborn kitten, was a fluffy white weasel.
“I know what you're thinking,” it said, its voice that of a British man. “But I am not a weasel. Or a ferret. Or a bloody polecat. I'm a stoat.”
She laughed. It was the first time she could remember laughing in… days, weeks maybe. But she didn't waste any time pondering this sad commentary of her life. Far more interesting to her was the fact that this stoat had no mind she could sense. It wasn't alive. So she said with a smile, “No, you're not.”
It beat its paws in frustration. “I—How did you know?”
Before she could answer, Ringo spoke. “Psu-Tem here?”
“Of course she's here. She never leaves. However—”
A voice like an out-of-tune lawnmower wafted in from the back room, cutting off the stoat. “Tell the cretin I may be seen by appointment only!”
The creature nodded. “Yes, as I was about to say, she may be seen by appointment only.”
Ringo looked unfazed. “Tell her I'm an old friend.”
“Tell the cretin he's lying! I have no friends!”
“She wishes to inform you that you're lying and she has no friends.”
“Tell her it's Ringo Slade.”
The voice was hesitant this time, but no less grating. “Ringo Slade, hmm? Tell the cretin… I suppose he may come back.”
The stoat again relayed the message. “She says you may come back.”
Ringo nodded his thanks and turned to Melissa. “Wait here,” he said, then disappeared through a curtain of beads into the back room. She could hear no more than murmurs as he began talking to the woman.
The creature atop the counter returned its gaze to Melissa. “Well? You were about to say?”
She wasn't sure it would be a good idea to tell the truth, so she shrugged. “Animals can't talk.”
“Spoken like a Protabound. Trust me, there are scores of worlds where animals can talk. But I, alas, am only a humble bionic.” At her questioning stare, he went on. “A robot. A machine.”
There was something Melissa found comforting about talking to it—or him, perhaps. She wasn't afraid of what he would think of her. He wasn't even alive, after all. She extended a hand. “I'm Melissa.”
“Fink,” he said, placing a paw upon her fingers. He looked pleased, though his musteline face was hard to read. When he noticed the locutor hanging from her shorts, though, he was definitely pleased. “Ah, a Van Krepe! The 239, if I'm not mistaken. Those aren't in style much anymore. Excellent alightision and post-locution lucidity, but the gap suppression is sub-par compared to newer models.”
Melissa didn't know what to say.
“Not a locutor enthusiast? That's quite all right. We've all got something. You, I'm guessing, are more of a… chess person.”
She retreated a half step, astonished. “How'd you know?”
Fink tapped a paw against the side of his head and squinted knowingly. “We bionics have certain… skills.”
She stood there, stunned. Could he… read minds? Then she realized where his eyes had been directed and looked down. Of course. She was wearing her old Willowfork Academy Chess Club t-shirt. She smiled at him. “So you can read. I'm impressed.”
“Oh, well. It was worth a try.”
At that point, Ringo's head reappeared through the beads and told Melissa to come on back.
Passing through the doorway, she found herself in a small room that had ambitions of being an entire house. It served as a kitchen, living room, library, storeroom, and office. Tomes even thicker, dustier, and older than those in the front room filled a number of bookshelves. The place smelled of solitude, tedium, and hot wax, the latter due to dozens of candles scattered about, some inches from books. A disaster waiting to happen. Ringo wasn't helping the matter, leaning against a bookshelf and working on another of his cigarettes.
Resting upon a table in the center of the room was a newspaper, The Rezeur Dispatch. The headline read: Thousands of Paintings Inaccessible as the Gs' Crackdown Continues—Rumors Circulate of Escaped Accidental.
Feeling anxious just looking at it, Melissa averted her eyes. They landed on the woman, Psu-Tem.
She sat in a chair on the far side of the table, her bony fingers clacking away at a typewriter. She couldn't have been much older than sixty, but time had not been kind to her. Her face was rugged, her skin pale, her eyes murky and red at the fringes. She wore a simple robe and a half-billion or so beaded necklaces.
“Well, child,” she said, not looking up from a stack of weathered pages a foot high that sat on the table beside the typewriter. “Are you insane? Is Ringo lying to me? Or is it true?”
Her imperious manner stopped Melissa short. “Is what true?” she asked.
Psu-Tem made an impatient gesture. “The matter in question, of course. Did you subdue a whole cadre of men without laying a hand on them?”
The medley of bloodied bodies flashed through Melissa's mind, and she was suddenly hesitant to speak to this woman.
“Come now, out with it,” Psu-Tem prompted.
“Maybe.”
A laugh. The clacking continued. “Maybe? That's all you have to say?”
“I… might have done something. I don't remember much.”
“Might? Maybe? Oh dear.” Psu-Tem looked at Ringo. “Ringo child, you're wasting my time with this…” She completed the sentence by way of a repelled expression and an indistinct wave of the hands in Melissa's direction. “The Kaguans probably did it to themselves. You know how they feud. And you know how easy the Kratka test gives false positives. She's certainly not… one of them. You should've stayed on Kagu. Now, I've got a thousand pages of records about the Spemian Pogrom to go through, so out with you both. Vamoose!” She flitted a hand in the direction of the door.
Melissa felt foolish for her hesitancy. She couldn't let it end here. She hadn't come this far for nothing. “Yes,” she said.
Psu-Tem looked up for the first time, her typing on hiatus. “Yes what, child?”
“Yes, I did it. It wasn’t a feud.”
“Are you sure?”
“I'm sure.”
Psu-Tem's tilt of the head was dubious. “Has this happened before?”
“No.”
A snicker. She returned to her typing and paper-inspecting. “Of course it hasn't. Well, have you anything else to say for yourself?”
Melissa wasn't sure what to say, let alone what exactly she was being asked, but Ringo spoke up. “She can't feel the pull, Psu.”
“Shut up, Ringo. I'm talking to the girl. Well?”
“I can't feel the pull.”
A roll of the eyes. “Do you know how many people I've met, young one, who say that and lie? Come here. Let's see your aegis.”
Melissa rounded the table and stopped near Psu-Tem, whose fingers quested the extents of her neck and scalp, at last pulling away hesitantly. The woman looked a little flummoxed.
Ringo started to speak. “If she could feel the pull right now, Psu, she'd be—”
“Doing exactly what she is now, most likely,” Psu-Tem snapped. But then she sighed. “Oh, fine then. Let's see if you pass it again.” She tossed a set of the spheres—a Kratka test—onto the table.
Melissa separated them. Psu-Tem checked each, looking even more flummoxed when she'd finished. “Again,” she said. Melissa complied.
By the time Pus-Tem had finished checking them a second time, she was scratching her hair and muttering to herself. “It doesn't necessarily mean anything. Hymie Herschel passed it three times, and he wasn't one. It's just chance. Just a hap.”
Melissa knew she couldn't leave here without finding out what this woman knew, but her mind was blank of any convincing arguments. Then she thought to state the obvious. “No, it's not. They're different colors.”
“What are different colors?”
“The spheres. Those are yellow. Those are green.”
Psu-Tem's face grew grave. Her mind, colorless to this point, flickered green, and her voice trembled. “What else can you see?”
It took Melissa a few seconds to overcome the wall of protection a lifetime of terror at the thought of revealing her secret had built. But she knew she had to tell this woman. Her voice trembling, she said the words, “I can see your mind. It's green.”
Psu-Tem's mind deepened its shade. “You lie.”
Melissa found it ironic that for the second time today, someone was scared of her, scared of the girl who could hardly think of standing up for herself. It gave her confidence. She replied with a shake of the head.
Psu-Tem locked eyes on her. “Do you know what they do to people who pretend to sense minds? Who lie as you have?” She paused dramatically. “They throw them into worlds whose pulls are acid to the mind, places of unendurable agony, and they leave them there until there's nothing left to consume.”
Her words were undermined by the terrified tone in which they were delivered, and something else.
“You're lying,” Melissa said. “I can see it. An amber flicker.”
The woman's face went white. Stiffly, she turned to Ringo and murmured, “She's the real thing.”
He gave little reaction. A slight raise of the eyebrows, perhaps, and he took another puff on his cigarette.
“What am I?” Melissa demanded, leaning forward.
Psu-Tem seemed to have gone into a trance. “Be still, child. Ringo and I must commune. Alone.”
“But—”
“No. You will abide here.” She rose and began to lead Ringo through a doorway into another room. He turned back and offered an apologetic shrug.
Melissa wanted to stop them, shout at them—and for a moment, she was paralyzed as she always was when contemplating such actions. But only a moment. She'd survived Luud trying to stab her to death twice, the Gs trying to wipe her memory, a bunch of madman trying to burn her face off and turn her into a slave, and now telling Psu-Tem she could sense minds. There was no reason to be scared of such a simple thing as this. Not anymore.
She sprang to her feet, snatching a wad of Psu-Tem’s papers with one hand and a candle with the other. “Stop!” she shouted.
The woman froze and turned, face melting into fury when she saw Melissa's pose, the flame inches from the papers. “Child! Put. That. Down. Give me the—”
Melissa cut her off with a shake of the head. “Nope. I'm done waiting. I've waited twelve years. So talk, and fast, or there's going to be a pogrom of your records.”
Ringo didn't appear the least bit troubled, but Psu-Tem looked in danger of an imminent head-splosion, her face red, her eyes wide. After a long, tense pause, her complexion began to calm, but she didn’t speak.
Melissa prompted her. “What I can do, it has to do with the worlds, doesn't it? I'm not affected by the pull… and I can see things from different worlds. That's how the test works, isn't it?” And Kyle's message, she thought.
“Very well, young one, you've made your point. Hand over the papers and we'll talk.” She extended a hand for them.
Melissa pulled back, clutching them even tighter, keeping the candle within range of a hasty attack. “Nope. I'm keeping these for now. Talk. What am I?”
Psu-Tem squinted at her, spitting air through clenched teeth. Then she looked to the floor. “Fine. You win. What you are, child, is one of the most powerful beings in the universe… what, in the modern tongue, is known as…”
She trailed off with a paranoid shudder, as though merely uttering her next word would bring down calamity upon this place. She scanned the walls and ceiling. The candles flickered. The bead curtain rippled in response to unseen air currents. Melissa stopped breathing.
At length, after a grim gulp, Psu-Tem's voice resumed. “…is known as a worldwielder.”
FOURTEEN
Melissa's brow furrowed. Her confusion at being called one of the most powerful beings in the universe, a statement she was sure couldn't be further from the truth, nearly caused the papers to fall right into the candle. At a gasp from Psu-Tem, Melissa lowered them to her side. “What does that mean?” she asked.
“It means that you can wield the pull of the worlds upon nearby minds, bending them to your will.”
“Like… mind control?”
Psu-Tem sniffed disdainfully. “Mind control. A simpleton's label.”
Ringo, from his perch against a bookshelf, spoke up. “It's mind control, kid.”
Psu-Tem shot him a glare. “It is not mind control. It is as much mind control as a house is a prison because they both have walls.”
“There're a few folk who'd disagree about that.”
“Mind control is coercion. There is no coercion in wielding.”
Ringo shrugged. “Depends on what you call coercion, I guess.”
“Ringo, child, you are out of your depth. Be silent. The fact is—”
Feeling the conversation slipping away from her, Melissa lifted the candle back to the papers. Psu-Tem's next word caught in her throat as she stared in horror at the flame.
“Explain how it works,” Melissa said.
Psu-Tem spoke in a hurried jumble. “You know that each world exerts a different pull on the mind. On Veritas, you tell the truth. On Mendax, you lie. On Insatia, you covet. On Liberis, you give. But it's not quite so simple. What you don't know is that every world is pulling on the mind at all times, because the worlds are linked. You see—”
“Slow down. If that's true, why does the pull change on each world?”
“I was about to explain. The worlds are like magnets to the mind. Whatever magnet you are closest to will exert the strongest influence. So it is with the worlds. A wielder is able to leverage the connections between the worlds to put a mind in a different world than the one it is in—to change the relative strength of the magnets, so to speak. If you wish someone to tell the truth, for example, you pull on their mind with Veritas, and they will behave as if they were on Veritas.”
“It does sound like mind control,” Melissa said to a roll of the eyes from Psu-Tem. “But I can't—”
“But you can. And you have.”
Melissa knew what she meant, that strange image from the canyon flashing again in her mind, but the thought only scared her. She'd wanted the truth, but now that she had it, she wasn't sure she liked it. She shook her head. “It was an accident. I have no idea how I did it. I couldn't do it again. It's not—I'm not—”
Seeing Melissa's unease, the corner of Psu-Tem's mouth curled into the shadow of a sneer. “It is true, your vim, as we call it, is latent. You would need practice to develop it, but already you can see the worlds pulling on minds in the form of colors. And if you used your vim by accident once, there is no doubt you will use it again. The only question is when will such an accident… kill someone?”
The candle slipped from Melissa's grip and hit the floor, extinguished. “Kill?!” she said, stunned. “I thought—”
Psu-Tem chuckled. “Spare us your ignorant thoughts, young one. You were correct earlier when you said I was lying, but perhaps you don't realize which part of my words were a lie. You see, there are worlds whose pull is acid to the mind, worlds that cause brain damage, paralysis, insanity, and even death.” She darted a quick glance at Ringo. “A wielder could just as easily pull on a mind with those worlds as any other.”
