Phoebe's Tale: Into the Light, page 72
“Afternoon. How are things wherever you are?” he asked.
“Not bad. Just checking into a bit of taxation without representation. How are things here?”
“About the same. Cameron is doing well. The villagers are happy. I’m shipping dynamos off to various places. Typical stuff.”
“Good to hear,” I agreed. He gestured and we walked together. “I heard you yell for me. Problem?”
“Yes and no.”
“You want another miracle?”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” he mused. “Maybe.” He held the door open to the breakroom and we went inside.
“Okay, you’re being cryptic.”
“Sorry. I don’t mean to be. I need to ask you about the microwave oven in your apartment and get your help with an issue in Tauta.”
“Barbarians invading the Empire?”
“No.”
“Angry gods challenging you for your position?”
“No.”
“Transplanted Romans marching all over the natives on the southern continent?”
“No.”
“Wow. This is a tough one. How many more guesses do I get?”
“If you’re implying I should come right out and tell you, I get the point.”
“Never crossed my mind,” I lied. “I won’t object if you would rather come right out and tell me…”
“I will, but Tauta is likely to be more involved. First, what’s the deal with the microwave?”
“What’s it doing?”
“How should I know?”
“Bad question,” I decided. “What’s the problem?”
“I’m not sure there is one,” he admitted. “Why don’t we go up and look at it?”
“Sure.” We headed to the elevator. “Want to tell me about Tauta on the way?”
“You know I’m not as powerful in Tauta as I am here.”
“I guessed. I don’t know what the equivalence of one nuclear power plant is to active worshippers.”
“With this setup? About two billion typical worshipers. Full-time priests and cloistered monks are worth more, of course. The Tassarian Empire doesn’t come close to matching the output here. It doesn’t have that many people, much less devoutly religious ones.”
“I’d think you have nearly everyone active in a world where the gods regularly appear or manifest or obviously do things.”
“Yeah, but I’ve got competition. Sort of. I have to share. I’m not the god of warriors, nor the god of merchants. If I were a singular deity over the whole place it would be different. I also wouldn’t have any allies when other deific manifestations showed up and tried to establish themselves.”
“Mmm. Better to share a pie than to have to defend it from all comers, I guess. Okay. What’s going on in the Empire?”
“It’s not the Empire. They aren’t even aware of it. It’s an anomaly out in the middle of the ocean.”
“There’s a lot of ocean,” I pointed out.
“There is,” he agreed, as the elevator doors opened. “Let’s look at the microwave and we’ll get back to this.”
In the apartment, the MMM2 was sitting where I’d left it. I had my sight tuned to detect magical phenomena, so I noted the micro-gates inside were cycling. They kept cycling, non-stop.
“Huh.”
“Yeah, it’s doing something. When you set it up, it wasn’t too active. Now it’s a constant thing. Even at full blast, I don’t mind this thing’s power requirements. Between the solar and geothermal supplies, we’ve got more than enough to keep a magical field around every dynamo the reactor can spin. What concerns Me is your gadget may be in a feedback loop.”
“Give me a minute.”
I pulled over a chair and unlatched the microwave’s casing, opening it up for examination. Everything was working perfectly. No magical short circuits, no obvious feedback, no burnouts…
“Aha.”
“Aha?”
“I found the problem.”
“Great. I love the suspense.”
“I am suddenly aware you and Pop sprang from the same source. I’ve heard that exact tone before.”
“I am unsurprised. What’s wrong with your gadget?”
“Oh, nothing is wrong with it, as such. It’s doing exactly what I designed it to do. It’s just nearly at capacity.”
“Capacity?” he repeated.
“When we stop by the apartment, we use the microwave,” I explained. “Sometimes for food, sometimes for drinks, sometimes for valuables, sometimes for weapons and technology. It’s a really handy gadget. It’s also faster, cheaper, and easier to use a magic item to come here, then use a magic item to summon stuff, than to go through the whole process of summoning what I want by casting the spells manually. Even moreso if I might have to try a couple of times to get it right.”
“I can understand that. And?”
“Remember the plan to bleed the Dingus?”
“You’re making him sweat blood by capturing his vampires and sticking them in stellar orbits.”
“Exactly. I’m also keeping the cleaned-out Earthline branches intact as primary search locations. The microwave searches in those worlds first, only creating a new branch if it doesn’t find what I’m looking for.”
“And the micro-gates have to keep connecting to maintain them,” he said, as the light dawned. “You’ve got a lot of branches in your list, now, so the gates are always connecting and reconnecting to keep them from collapsing.”
“Exactly.”
“So it’s not about to blow up?”
“No, it’s just busy. I knew it was busy the last time I was here, but I didn’t think it was this close to capacity. The micro-gates inside can only connect so quickly. I’ll have to add more.”
“Hang on,” Uncle Dusty protested. “Before you do that, consider. This is the keystone to a bloodletting attack on a massively powerful celestial creature. Maybe having it in My house isn’t the best place for it.”
“You can guard it from interference, can’t you?”
“To a degree,” he hedged. “If it pisses him off enough, the Dingus can smite it. I think I can keep him from figuring out where it is. If not, and if he’s angry enough about it, he may decide to go to the trouble of destroying it—and anything around it. You’re risking a sizable fraction of My reactor power by keeping it here.”
“Mm. I suppose I should improve it and move it. The system needs more micro-gates. It also needs more automation. I originally started it as a convenience. Now it’s a weapon. I should redesign it so the weapon is separate. The Box of Summoning portion can still take advantage of the catalogue of ‘cleaned’ universes. I intended to do this when I first weaponized my grocery shopping. I never got around to it. Sorry.”
“May I suggest now is a good time?”
“Rusty’s doing intelligence-gathering,” I agreed. “Let me notify him I’ll be busy and I’ll get on it. When he’s done, I can take a break to finish up in Karká or he can take a break to help me finish The Bloodletter.”
“’The Bloodletter’?”
“It’s what I’ve decided to call my Dingus-power-bleeding device. It’s using his own vampires against him, so…”
“The name seems apt. If you’re going to focus on this for a bit, can I ask you to use your time-ticker chain to slow down Tauta? The issue is likely to take longer than your project. Slow Tauta down and come back to it when you’re done. Is that reasonable?”
“Very much so. Have you been taking reasonableness lessons?” I asked. He snorted.
“There are times when you remind Me an awful lot of your father.”
“That’s hardly surprising, is it?”
Journal Entry #120
I had to alter a few things about my prototype weaponized microwave oven. First and foremost, I had to arrange things so the microwave itself wasn’t the lynchpin of the whole operation. This was the easy part. All I had to do was move the index crystals to the starship Revenge—but I didn’t.
At first, I thought I would need a lot more micro-gates to stabilize all the branched Earthlines. Now I realize there’s a minor flaw in my plan. A misconception on my part, really. Once I had the Dingus vampires placed in space coffins, did I need to keep the branch they came from? No. The main purpose of cleaning out a branch was to obtain vampires for Operation Anemia! Why was I bothering to maintain branches where the vampires were cleaned out? Why use cleaned-out branches for my gate searches? I should be happy to make a new branch! With every new branch I would get a fresh set of vampires! And wasn’t that the whole point? To grab more Dingus-vampires and bleed the Dingus more completely?
I’ve been going about this all wrong.
The Revenge now has a new program. Using a collection of spells, it specifically looks for exact matches of the seven Dingus vampires we’ve found. There’s a fairly complicated series of pre-checks to determine if it’s got all seven, but when it has a positive lock and line on when sunup occurs, it snatches all seven in order. The key to that is to get the one who is closest to the sunset line. This maximizes the number in bed and semi-comatose. The one—or ones—about to go to sleep don’t have time to notice their colleagues are missing! Once the ship has a full set, it parks them in orbit and moves to a new star.
The real key to this is the Revenge doesn’t maintain the branch it creates. The branch collapses. The process isn’t about minimizing the number of vampires we create. Quite the opposite! It’s about harvesting as many vampires as possible to use as power drains, then spreading them across interstellar—or intergalactic—distances.
This is why we make prototypes. Clearly, starting with a kitchen convenience colored my operational plan. The new, revised plan is for the MMM2 to do regular searching again, without reference to an index of “clean” worlds. It auto-forwards the new branch coordinates to the Revenge, which then grabs any sleeping Dingus-vampires it can find. The branch is then left to collapse on its own, producing a minimal amount of energy for the Dingus. Meanwhile, the Revenge keeps adding to the pile of energy-draining vampires!
Speaking of intergalactic distances, the Revenge doesn’t have a drive system capable of intergalactic travel. Technically, yes, it can cross the intergalactic void, much the same way rocket ships can travel to other stars. From a practical standpoint, it’s simply not fast enough. In anticipation of such a journey, I’ve added iridium stripes around the hull and done a lot of engraving. Hopefully, by the time it finishes with the unoccupied stars in this galaxy, the shift spell I’ve given it will be tempered and strengthened by constant power use, enough to make a ship-sized point-to-point transit within the same universe. So the ship warps around this galaxy, fills up the vampire slots around the stars, and magically jumps to another galaxy to continue. At least, that’s the plan.
How many Dingus-vampires will we get? I don’t know. I’d like to see several billion sucking power out of him. How much blood will he sweat from a galaxy filled with comatose vampires in maintenance mode? He’s got to notice, sooner or later, from the sheer volume of power loss. What does he do then? Destroy all the vampires we’ve stolen? Or does he destroy the branch, hoping to destroy whoever is responsible?
Should I put a firmament spell on the Revenge? No, probably not. It would be bad if it was the only surviving thing from a collapsed branch and the Dingus decided to examine it. He might figure out how we’re doing this and find a way to stop it. Better to start completely over rather than give anything away.
With the upgraded Revenge running and set up to operate for the next few thousand years—local time, of course—I checked in with Rusty on a mirror. He was still enjoying our island paradise while he watched and listened to local nobility.
“Took me a bit to find the Counts,” he admitted. “Now I’m waiting for them to have significant discussions about stuff. Sooner or later, one of them is going to get a report or issue orders or discuss a plan.”
“It could be a while,” I pointed out. “Need anything?”
“Nope. I’ve got supplies and the island is pretty big. All is well. Besides, I’ve got my talisman to get me back to the shift-space in the workroom.” He held up one hand and rattled the beaded bracelet on his wrist. “How’s the uncle?”
“He’s okay. Still got an issue in Tauta he wants me to look at. I’ve been busy fixing up the vampire-grabbing for the Revenge.”
“What was wrong with it?”
So I explained what was going wrong and what I did to fix it. Rusty nodded along and agreed it was a vast improvement.
“If the Vampocalypse universe—or should we call it the Bloodletting universe?—if it collapses, we’ll have to start completely over? There’s no way to salvage the freighter?”
“Not without risking the Dingus spotting it.”
“Mm. If we have to start over, we probably ought to use multiple branches. By spreading the vampires out across universes, they’ll be even less noticeable, won’t they?”
“I’m not sure. Uncle Dusty says there’s got to be a critical number beyond which will cross his threshold of awareness. Too many in proximity will be more like… like… you know how a magnifying glass can burn you with sunlight? You can also focus it less and get a warm sensation. It’s kind of like that. We’re spreading them out, but the whole universe may start to sting after a while. There’s no way to tell, exactly.”
“Add a counting function to the computer program on the Revenge,” he suggested. “Have it keep the Magic Microwave updated. If the vampires are all destroyed or the universe stops existing, we can aim for half that number and start spreading them out across multiple branches.”
“Good plan.”
“I thought so, but I would, wouldn’t I? What else can I do to help?”
“You’re fine for now,” I told him. “I’ll find out what Uncle Dusty’s Tauta issue is and get back to you.”
“Addio, mia cara.”
Since I was in the workroom when I called Rusty, I then called Uncle Dusty and asked him if he was ready with the next problem. He directed me to a conference room with a whiteboard. I wondered where he got the markers for it. The original ones would have dried up long ago. Then I remembered the all-purpose shift closet. Unlike the resource boxes Pop built for dynamo construction, the closet could target anything and anywhere. Or could those boxes be used for anything besides a default resource? I may be making an assumption; I haven’t checked them.
“Okay,” I said, settling into a chair at the conference table. “What’s up?”
“You’re done with your vampire-grabbing upgrades?”
“Yep.”
“It’s all set up? It’ll run for ten thousand years without further attention?”
“Yes. It should. I mean, it could be hit by a relativistic, extragalactic rogue asteroid, I suppose. Aside from a wildly improbable accident, it should be good until it runs out of galaxies.”
“Just making sure,” he said. “Okay, here’s My problem.” He drew on the whiteboard as he talked. “This is the continent with the Tassarian Empire. This is the Empire on the east coast, and here’s the mountain range between them and the kustoni. La Mancha is here,” he put an elongated ellipse in the mountains. “The rest of the continent runs west and south, like so. You have the shallow part of the Shallow Sea out to here, then it gets deeper beyond about here, and the ocean continues east. You get a continent here, with its southern coast dipping down to about the same latitude as the city of Argesh in the Empire.” He drew a dotted line on his hasty map.
“The rest of it spreads out northward and covers the Pole, like so. Go south across the ocean from this continent and you run into the southern continent. It’s a medium-fair voyage, but nothing like the trip west to get to the Tassarian Empire. Um…” he trailed off, still drawing. “See over here, on the Empire’s continent? The Kasnakani Range runs southwest for a while. Here, where it peters out into the western waters, it’s at the same latitude as the northern part of the southeastern continent.” He drew another dotted line.
“I’ve seen this one. It’s the place where we transplanted the Romans from Rethven.”
“Yes. The natives here are along the northern coast,” he said, changing colors and making little slash marks to partially color in their territory.
“Do these continents have names?”
“Sort of. There’s Tassar, obviously, with the Tassarian Empire. The original civilization was on Kan’nes, and the colonies down south were on Kan’nes-vosh, but I haven’t checked to see what they’re calling themselves now.”
“I’m not getting anything from my translation spell besides random gibberish. Do these names mean anything?”
“Sure. In the old tongue of the Nesiri, Nes is for people. Kan is for land. Kan’nes, the land of the people. And vosh, from vo, meaning two. Vosh would be second. The second land of the people.”
“Okay. We were discussing proper names and the meaning of words. My translator is working. I was confused for a second. Please go on. Tell me more about Kan’nes-vosh, the southern continent.”
“It’s tropical. The former Romans—the Rethvans—are along the eastern coast and farther south, away from the equator and near the edge of subtropical latitudes.” He changed colors again and made more marks, although in a much smaller area along the eastern coastline.
“Got it. And on the northern continent, we’ve got the original Tautans? Their empire collapsed and they’re in a Dark Ages kind of thing? Huts, primitive farming, tribal, all that?”
“Pretty much. They’re a cut above the kustoni only because they have myths about the previous empire. These color their moral and ethical values.”
“How is this different from the kustoni?”
“The kustoni don’t have any.”
“Myths?”
“Morals.”
“Ah. Now I have a pretty good idea of where everything is and who occupies it. What’s the problem? The anomaly, I mean. Is there a portal between worlds letting high-tech visitors invade? Or are dragon-riding troops marching through?”
“No,” he said, looking startled. “Although I hadn’t considered a natural portal, like contact points with Faerie. Those are usually weak places that can be triggered, not open holes between worlds. I suppose it might be possible to force one open and hold it.”
