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Thresholder, ch 144, Stopgap
🕑 Added 2024-11-18 21:58:43 +0000 UTCThere was originally an author's note here, it got moved to its own post.
~~~~
The Farfinder hadn’t quite crash landed. It was laying next to a pond with its nose blown off, looking like a giant metal animal that was resting after a fight. From the outside, it was actually rather small, wider than a semi but only about as long. Most of its current interior was extradimensional space, which it didn’t have on all worlds. Perry had seen it from the outside a few times, and it always looked dinky. With the bridge a mess, it looked even worse, like one a monstrously oversized mobile homes much more than a starship.
The ship had attracted a small crowd, but it had landed in the wake of three separate attacks on Calamus, and whatever was going on in the city was taking precedence. They seemed to have decided that the Farfinder wasn’t a threat to anyone. Still, two dozen people standing around didn’t fill Perry with happiness. They were on a deadline now, or several deadlines, and if the civilians got in the way, that was a higher chance that it would all go wrong.
Kes still had his arm broken, though Perry had done some basic first aid to slow the bleeding. Kes was a werewolf, which would help, and under the light of a full moon, or with a blast of moonlight from Perry, he would be fine.
Perry was trying his best to heal up the damage to the fusion reactor, which in theory was only a matter of letting energy flow out, but without the reactor, energy was in short supply.
Fenilor had left behind weapons, not seeming to care about them, which was good, because in theory each weapon was one less bit of magic that would be threaded from this world to the next. The pen knife that had kept Perry immobile was kept in one of the armor’s small storage compartments, and Perry was holding the glass sword, which had been cast to the side in a scuffle and never retrieved. The spear that Perry had stolen was broken, but there was a chance that it might be mended. Halfway to the ship, Perry had been able to call his sword back to him, for unclear reasons — either it had finally worked free from whatever was pinning it in place, or someone had unwittingly done Perry a favor.
Perry was still reeling from the lost fight. It was a proper loss, the worst he’d ever faced, and if Fenilor had been worried in the slightest that Perry would upset the quasi-utopia, then Perry would have surely died. Having someone make the choice not to kill him was humiliating.
Hella came out of the marred ship to meet them. She was in her battle outfit, a spandex number that showed off the entirety of her legs, with see-through mesh going up the sides of her body. It was much more revealing than he had expected, but it wasn’t his first time seeing it. He didn’t know whether it was something that her government had mandated for her when she was a superhero or something she’d picked up along the way per her own preferences.
“Marchand has briefed everyone,” said Hella as they came near. “You can handle these people if they get rowdy or try to move us?”
“Yes,” said Perry, though what he wanted was to take the armor off and lay down. “We’re still trying to reach Dirk, this is the sort of thing he should handle. And I want to be in the loop on what we know and what we’re planning.”
Hella nodded. “If Third Fervor is dead and Fenilor is gone, there’s nothing much for the rest of us — the non-engineers, non-scientists — to do. Mette is clearly better at project management than I am. I’ll try to keep on top of it, just so I can make whatever calls I need to, but it’s a technical problem now.”
Perry nodded. He took off his helmet and held it by his side. There was a smell of blood and sweat inside the helmet, which hadn’t been entirely wicked away yet. “There’s still a chance that someone has left behind some landmines.”
“You be on the lookout for them then,” said Hella. She let out a breath. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be snippy, just — we’re wounded here.” She looked at the ship that she’d been making her home for years, and a grimace settled on her face.
“I’m going in,” said Kes. “Medical.”
Hella did a double take when she looked at his arm. “Go, now, there’s an Eggy with medical training. But can’t you heal on your own?”
“No energy for it,” said Kes with a wince. He was doing far, far better than he should have been, which Perry credited to the werewolf blood.
“I’m drained,” said Perry. “If we can get up to the moon … ?” Moonlight would give him energy, and a transformation would repair the fusion core.
“Eggy says half an hour to get us back up,” said Hella. “We came down harder than we planned. When the bridge blew there was damage to the entire ship, and it seems we didn’t catch all of it.”
Kes moved past her, climbing up the lip of the ruined bridge and going inside.
“I should be a part of the conversation,” said Perry. “Whatever we decide to do.”
“I agree,” said Hella. “But the options right now are limited, unless we want to abandon this world. And even if we did want to abandon this world, it’s not clear that we would be able to. There aren’t any punches out.”
“Fenilor’s hasn’t shown up?” asked Perry.
“No,” said Hella. “But there’s something we’ve seen from it. The new method, the one we got from Moss, lets us see a bulge in the world, a place where something is happening in higher dimensions. We don’t know whether the thresholder algorithm is working on something, whether it’s holding him in place while it waits for the stars to align, or if the punch is imminent.”
“The portal is hanging around,” said Perry. “We can send people through now, if the Farfinder can’t make the trip. Better than dying here.”
Hella shook her head. “Becoming a thresholder? That’s not what we’re here for, especially not because from what we know, we’d all get split up. Eggy is the only one with the knowledge necessary to make a new engine to travel through the punches, and even then, it would take a world with heavy infrastructure and good enough technology.”
“Someone else then,” said Perry. “Send through volunteers, hope that their punch goes through before Fenilor’s.”
“That’s … not a terrible idea,” said Hella. “Where are you getting those volunteers from though?”
“Dirk,” said Perry. “He could have twenty men lined up in half an hour, if we got ahold of him.”
“Men?” asked Hella with a raised eyebrow.
“You know what I mean,” said Perry. “But yes, probably men, because they’d be from Berus, and they haven’t shed the last vestiges of gender roles.”
Hella frowned, but she was the one who’d started that petty shit. Perry found himself annoyed with her, and she seemed annoyed with him, though maybe it was just that he’d lost his match. “Worth trying, I suppose.”
“Has it happened before, in your travels? Lots of punches out, showing mass travel through the portal?” asked Perry.
“Twice,” said Hella. “They go to different places. It doesn’t seem to affect stability, not that we have all that good of methods to study that, not that our models are on firm ground.”
“As soon as communications are up, I’ll contact Dirk, he should have his phone on him,” said Perry. “That will give us the best chance of getting the Farfinder out.”
“Perry, we’re staying,” said Hella. “We’re staying unless it’s absolutely clear that doing so is pointless. If there’s a chance we can help these people, that’s what we’re doing, even if there’s risk to our lives. If you’re not willing —”
“I am,” said Perry. “You’re right. I’m just not sure that I have anything to offer here. You said as much. My expertise is fighting.”
She kindly did not say anything about the fight he’d just lost.
~~~~
Once they got in touch, Dirk gathered up people. They weren’t the ones that Perry would have chosen: he had been imagining a collection of sharp-jawed young men, brawny and ready to scrap, but what Dirk assembled at the edge of town were the sickliest people that Perry had seen, some of them missing limbs and others looking like they were on death’s door.
“You said that the portals healed people,” said Dirk. They had talked over the phone, which was a novel experience for Dirk. He must have been holding the phone too far away from his face, because the audio was poor until Marchand fixed it. “Better to send the sick, people we can’t help here.”
“I never said they healed people,” said Perry. “I said … there’s some match-making, I guess, some balancing of thresholders. So if you go through and you’re dying then … yeah, sure, you’re probably going to end up in a world with something to heal you, because otherwise the fight won’t be fair. But that’s different from saying the portal heals. It doesn’t. It doesn’t fix.”
“It might send these people to a world where they can instantly and effortlessly be better,” said Dirk. “Where they have a chance of spreading the culture.”
Perry considered this. “Yes, technically.”
“And if I was sending the most able-bodied people we have, the ones we can ask for the most labor from, then that would weaken us here,” said Dirk. “You need volunteers? These are people who have wanted their whole lives to be useful. They wanted to fight for independence and weren’t able to do everything that others could. Are you going to deny them their chance?”
“No,” said Perry.
He felt awkward about it though. He wanted to say that it was one of the conceits of the culture that a person was not to be measured by their productivity, and this was essentially true, but it was also a part of the culture that people should want to pitch in as much as they could. They should put in as much time and labor as they could. It was part of the culture that social censure should be used on those that shirked work, and it was perhaps inevitable that someone who couldn’t work would have people give them the side eye. This was especially true in Berus, where the revolution was in its infancy and experiencing all the growing pains that Perry would have expected.
Still, as Perry looked out on the small crowd, he couldn’t help but see the infirm and disabled, and couldn’t stop himself from thinking that they were being culled, even if the portal really did seem to offer a chance for them to be healed, or made whole. And who was Perry to tell someone with an arm missing that they shouldn’t feel any different about it?
“Many of them were made this way by effluence,” said Dirk. “Blinded by it, deafened by it, with pieces of them warped or twisted, torn apart. You wake up and your arm has been replaced with a chicken wing. Your whole leg gets shot through with wood when a chair explodes. And these are the lucky ones, the ones that lived through it. I saw a woman who’d been found with flowers in her veins.”
“Mmm,” said Perry. “I can see why it’s worth fighting against. I always could.”
“The people here, they remember it, because for them, it was how it was months ago, how it still is because we haven’t been able to shut everything off and the effluence takes time to fade.”
“And your hope is that they continue the fight elsewhere?” asked Perry.
“I do,” said Dirk. “If there are fights happening out there, better that they’re fights where our people are a part of it. This? Here? People who came out of a portal, whose interests are only, at best, aligned with ours?” He shook his head. “No. Better that it’s our people.”
“Then they should go through now,” said Perry. “No sense in waiting.”
It took time to line everyone up, but once they were lined up, it was just a matter of them filing through while Perry held the shelf space open for them. Dirk stood by, watching them all go, some of them hobbling. This took some time.
Perry wished that there had been time to vet them, to make sure they weren’t coerced, but time was of the essence. It wasn’t even clear that this would do anything, whether the competing punches actually could make it to another universe before Fenilor did.
“You lost,” said Dirk.
“Yeah,” said Perry. “Won one fight, lost the other. The one I lost was the big one.”
“And the danger isn’t passed,” said Dirk, eyeing him. “Is it?”
“No,” said Perry. “Potentially … we might be looking at something very bad. We’ll do everything we can, try to minimize the potential for damage, but we’ve been working on the problem for a few hours, and it’s not clear that we have more than a few days. It might be intractable.”
“I can offer you anything we have,” said Dirk. “More people, cloning machines, materials, scientists. Whatever it takes to make sure that whatever you think is going to happen doesn’t happen.”
“Okay,” said Perry. “I’ll send that up the chain of command.”
The volunteers were sent with nothing, which seemed like a death sentence to Perry, but if they were premising this on the portal providing the bare necessities, then who knew, maybe it would mean that they would land somewhere that fed, clothed, and sheltered them. Paradoxically, the better you were prepared, the worse conditions you were expected to face, at least from everything they knew about how the portals worked.
And of course, they didn’t know everything. Magicians called it the Grand Spell, it was a law of the multiverse that kept being rediscovered, and not just when thresholders turned up somewhere kicking up dust in their brawl, but the mechanism and purpose were still opaque. Hella seemed to think that it was some kind of neural net thing, intelligence gathering, training up some dataset, and there was something about that which sounded compelling to Perry, like he was fighting for a reason, not for amusement but to tease apart the margins of some prediction machine’s output — but of course he didn’t know for certain.
Eventually, the last of the old and crippled citizens moved through the portal. They vanished, obviously, and they wouldn’t be seen or heard from again, not unless the Farfinder punched through to go find them. They would be out there fighting, as absurd as it sounded, and Perry hoped that regeneration and rejuvenation helped them.
But there was a boy who remained, and he stepped up to Perry once the last of them were through.
“I want to go,” he said.
He was sixteen, maybe. Perry was always bad at guessing ages. A few years ago, when he’d been a grad student, he had that strange feeling of adulthood, thinking that the teenagers were much younger than he’d been when he was a teenager. After his time aboard the Natrix, his idea of what children were capable of had change: it wasn’t uncommon for him to see ten-year-olds working as mechanics, technicians, or assistants.
“I want to go,” the boy said again, pointing at the portal. “That leads to another world? A place where they’re still fighting?”
“It does,” said Dirk with a nod. He didn’t glance at Perry for confirmation, though this was almost entirely on Perry’s say-so, a leap of faith.
“Then that’s where I want to be,” he said. “The fight is finished here. It’s over. There’s only Thirlwell left, and it’s going to fall, it can’t stand against us. Everything people are saying, that this was the final big fight, that they lost their champion, that we have moles deep inside their security service, that there’s only desperation left … I want to be useful. I want to carry on the work.”
“Mmm,” said Dirk. “The work isn’t only fighting. The fight is important. Militance is essential. But not everything is a fight. Not everything is finding an enemy to destroy and subvert. Most of the culture? It’s helping other people, putting in work without the expectation that you’ll be paid back one day, putting in the work because it’s the right thing to do, because you’re young, healthy., driven, and because the culture can’t work without you. The other worlds do need us. I’ve had more time to think about this than you have, but yes, they do need us, there are millions of people living under the thumbs of a thousand kings. But this world needs us too. It needs you.”
“And the fight’s not over,” said Perry. “The city lies in ruins. There’s a need, right at this very moment, for someone to clean up, for people to help sort out food, get people places to stay, to rebuild. There’s work to be done.”
“We’re at the end,” said the boy. He was scrawny, in that teenaged way, like his body had grown too fast and not paid enough attention to putting meat on his bones. “You said this was the only chance.”
“It’s not,” said Dirk. “Probably not. We’re going to find a way to travel worlds. We’re still in the planning stages right now, but the culture will find other places to spread, other ways to spread, and if you want to dig in and fight the fight, then there will be places to do that.”
The boy looked at the portal with no small amount of longing. He held his body tight, like he was ready to throw a fist at one of them, even though Perry was in his armor. He kept glancing at the portal, which was through the shelf space. Perry hadn’t closed it yet, and could at any moment, but he was willing to hear the kid out.
“Do you know who I am?” asked Dirk.
The boy nodded. “You’re someone important, from the mainland.”
“That’s right,” nodded Dirk. “And I’ve been fighting the fight for ages, decades, since I was your age. And you have to believe me when I say that the real fight is inglorious. It’s not what he does, battling giants across the city, fighting with a gleaming sword and bulky armor. It’s sifting through reports, it’s helping with the labor, and sometimes it’s sitting at a meeting and arguing with some people who think they know better than you. Sometimes it’s sitting in those meetings and admitting they’re right.”
“I’m still going through,” said the boy, as though daring them to stop him.
“I’ll leave it to my armored friend to decide,” said Dirk with a sigh. He looked to Perry.
“Go,” said Perry with a nod. “Fight the fight. Kill the people who stand against you and your vision of the future. Rebuild the culture on distant shores.”
The boy rushed through. He had nothing but the clothes on his back, just like Perry when he’d gone through the portal, though Perry had also had a cell phone in his pocket, for all the good it had done him.
“Do you believe that?” asked Dirk. “About fighting the fight?”
“No,” said Perry. “Or … yes. But I said it mostly because it was what he wanted to do anyway.” He shrugged. “Better for him to go out with that in his head. I don’t think a militant will do well. Compromise seems like a better weapon. But I suppose it ultimately doesn’t matter, if the Grand Spell is matching people up.”
“You lost,” said Dirk. “Did you think about that as those people went through?” There was a slight edge to his voice.
“I did,” said Perry. “Maybe a quarter of them will die.” He tried to think about the numbers, but it was difficult to say. “Less, in their first world, maybe. Fewer killers early on. More defeats that just see them sent through to another portal.”
Dirk let out a breath. “It would have been nice to give them a proper briefing, but I’ve never had a proper briefing, no understanding of what the worlds out there are like, no knowledge of what a thresholder actually is. Today … there are hundreds dead. It’s grim in the city.” He looked at Perry. “And you lost the fight.”
“I did,” said Perry. He winced. “It’s my first actual loss. Second, if I count the one against Cosme, but he underestimated me, tried to steal from me, died because of it — or lived, I guess. Hard to say.”
“Easy to claim you like fights when you win a lot,” said Dirk. “Easy to say that you love it when your fist is dripping with the blood of your enemies. But even against Third Fervor, though I didn’t see all of it, it was …”
“A bloodbath,” said Perry. “I was supposed to be there to stop her, and I didn’t really do that, even if she died in the end. I know.”
“But you’re aching to go through that portal, aren’t you?” asked Dirk.
Perry looked at it. It was sitting there, waiting for him, his prize for winning the fight. “How could you tell?”
“Because you’ve been holding it open even though no one is waiting to go through,” said Dirk.
“This whole world might be done for,” said Perry as his eyes went to the portal again. “It’s logical to jump through now, while I have a chance. But I won’t do that, not if there’s a possibility that I can help.” It made his stomach flip though. Time was running out. Soon there would be no escape through the portal, because the portal would be gone. After that, second guesses would be worth nothing.
“I’ve thought about it too,” said Dirk. “If you hadn’t stolen the cloning machine, I would make another and send him through, so at least some scrap of me can survive. Unless you’re going to give it back?”
“Fenilor broke it,” said Perry. “He made sure of that.” He let out a breath. “Sorry.”
Dirk swore. “Well then dump the pieces out, and we’ll have Moss take a crack at putting it back together again.”
“There are more urgent matters,” said Perry. He let the shelfspace snap shut, hiding the portal. “All the engineering effort needs to be on Fenilor.”
“And that’s a fight you’re leaving to others?” asked Dirk.
Perry turned to him. “I’m not an engineer. I’m not a scientist. My ideas are going to be less than worthless, they’re going to suck time away from the people that are actually suited to this problem. I don’t know where along the way I became a warrior, but that’s what I am, and if they need me to hit someone very hard with my sword, then that’s where it’ll be my time to shine.”
“You let me know what mountains I need to move,” said Dirk. “Use the thing.” He pulled the smartphone from his pocket and waggled it in front of Perry. “I’m off to the city, to see what I can do there, but I’ll need your ability to move across oceans in a heartbeat if you want me to mobilize.”
Perry nodded, and stepped up into the ship as Dirk went on his way.
The bulk of the crew were in the “break room”, deep in an argument that slowed as soon as he made his presence known. There he was, Perry the loser, the reason that they were all going to have to go through this. He had failed to stop Fenilor, which was his only job, and now he had to hope that engineering or scientific prowess would find a way out. If it couldn’t, then he would have to hope that the ship’s drive could be repaired in time, and that he could hitch a ride to the next world — but of course he wouldn’t be a thresholder there, and he wouldn’t take his powers with him, which would reduce him to what, a normal man? Marchand would stop working too, with both second sphere and the reactor rendered non-functional.
Hella came over to him as the arguments continued, more subdued.
“We’re about to lift off,” said Hella. “Eggy got the engines running again, we can retreat to somewhere a little less exposed.” She still hadn’t changed out of her battle outfit, the spandex number, and it did look a little ridiculous in comparison to the clothes everyone else was wearing. Next to Perry in his power armor was where she probably looked most normal.
“What’s the news?” asked Perry.
“We have a way out,” said Hella. “We can see the energy spikes where you let people through, punches going outward to new worlds. And two of them have already landed, giving us a straight shot somewhere else if the drive is working.”
Perry betrayed no emotion, but he felt immense relief. He was staying until the end, but if there was a release valve, some way out …
“The two that landed are in the same world, incidentally,” said Hella. “Either it’s a teamup, or they’re matched against each other, it’s impossible to say with the current instrumentation.”
“What about Fenilor?” asked Perry. “Has the new data changed the math?”
“They’re zeroing in,” said Hella. “We’re currently looking at a lower-bound release of energy that would destroy everything in a hundred mile radius.”
“That’s a lot less than a light-year,” said Perry.
“It is,” said Hella. “Lower bound, mind you.”
“That’s a survivable amount less, for this planet,” said Perry. More tension felt like it was releasing from him. They had been talking about the wholesale destruction of this entire world, and now, if it was just a hundred miles, two hundred miles, that was … well, millions dead, but not the whole world.
“Except that it would kick up dirt and dust, which would block the sun for as much as years,” said Hella. “And these people currently get most of their power from sunlight, which would mean that they would have to switch over to effluence again. It would be a very, very high death toll.”
“Ah,” said Perry. “And here’s me being hopeful about it.”
“We’ll do what we can,” said Hella. “But the speed of the new thresholders that are already in a new world, it’s making me reconsider how much time we actually have.” She sucked on her teeth for a moment. “There are too many unknowns hanging in the air.”
“Agreed,” said Perry. He looked over at the argument in progress. “Dirk said that we can have anything we need. I think as soon as we get the doors working again, we bring in Moss.”
“We’re not going to be opening doors anytime soon,” said Hella. “There was a piece of hardware that was broken when I blew out the ship. Mette thinks that she might be able to replace it, given a month, but that’s time we don’t have. We can get the ship in the sky soon, I hope, and then fly over to Moss, but I’m also not sure how much help he’s going to be. Adding in more engineers doesn’t necessarily make the work go faster. At a certain point, there’s too much overhead getting people up to speed.”
“But we’re not at that point,” said Perry. “And if we can get a new cloning machine, or get the old one up and running, then we can parallelize, have instances of people dedicated to bringing others into the loop.” He shifted his weight. “What are you thinking the odds are that they handle this?”
“I don’t know, Perry,” said Hella. “The loss … it happened. And now we’re in the unfortunate position of waiting to see what happens next, without much control over any of it.” She looked at the assembled engineers. “I would prefer to get my hands dirty, to work myself to the bone, but I’m useless here, and that makes it harder, because all I can do is sit and watch, hoping for the best, guiding where it’s needed. And what remains is for me to work them to the bone, which I’ll do, if I have to, if they’re not doing it themselves.”
“And we sit on the sidelines?” asked Perry. “That’s that?”
“It unfortunately appears that way,” said Hella. “As soon as Mette has a use for you, you’ll be doing whatever she asks of you.”
Perry let out a breath. “And what’s the timetable? Days? Weeks?”
Hella gave a tense shrug. “We don’t know, Perry. It might all be over in a heartbeat, once Fenilor finds his match. But even across the multiverse, thresholders are rare, and we can’t rule out that exceptions like Fenilor take longer.”
“The portal is going to close,” said Perry. “Then we’ll be betting everything on the engineers. We’ll be helpless, you and me.”
“I’ve felt helpless for a very long time, moving in the wake of thresholders,” said Hella. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them to look at Perry. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to put this on you. You’ve tried your best.”
Perry nodded. “I’m sorry I failed.”
He waited for her to say that it wasn’t his fault, but maybe she didn’t even realize that she was supposed to. Her eyes had gone back to the engineers, watching them talking with each other. They were gathered around a single screen that was projecting a three-dimensional graph, which Perry couldn’t make any sense of. He hoped it was a good sign that they had figured something out, but they didn’t call him or Hella over, and so they were left standing there together like pieces of furniture.
It wasn’t until another three hours later that they had anything like news.
“We can stop him,” said Mette. “But it’s not going to be easy.”
