Doors of Sleep Read online

  PRAISE FOR TIM PRATT

  “Pratt’s thoughtful worldbuilding, revealed little by little, continues to impress… This well-imagined universe, populated by original and empathetic characters, has enough energy to power what could become a long-lived series.”

  Publishers Weekly

  “Brilliantly fun space opera that reminds me of Killjoys but with more Weird Alien Cool Shit.”

  Locus

  “The engaging, inclusive, and entertaining Axiom series, may be his best work yet… witty, heartfelt sci-fi romp.”

  Tor.com

  “Fun, funny, pacy, thought-provoking and very clever space opera – a breath of fresh air.”

  Sean Williams, author of Twinmaker

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  THE AXIOM TRILOGY

  The Wrong Stars

  The Dreaming Stars

  The Forbidden Stars

  The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl

  Briarpatch

  Heirs of Grace

  The Deep Woods

  Blood Engines

  Poison Sleep

  Dead Reign

  Spell Games

  Bone Shop

  Broken Mirrors

  Grim Tides

  Bride of Death

  Lady of Misrule

  Queen of Nothing

  Closing Doors

  ANGRY ROBOT

  An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd

  Unit 11, Shepperton House

  89-93 Shepperton Road

  London N1 3DF

  UK

  angryrobotbooks.com

  twitter.com/angryrobotbooks

  What’s behind Door Number One?

  An Angry Robot paperback original, 2021

  Copyright © Tim Pratt 2021

  Cover by Kieryn Tyler

  Edited by Simon Spanton and Paul Simpson

  Set in Meridien

  All rights reserved. Tim Pratt asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Sales of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed” and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.

  Angry Robot and the Angry Robot icon are registered trademarks of Watkins Media Ltd.

  ISBN 978 0 85766 874 5

  Ebook ISBN 978 0 85766 875 2

  Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ Books.

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Liza & Daryl: fellow travelers

  CONTENTS

  A Parting of the Ways • The What, If Not the Why • A Dark Sea • Enter Minna • [Unable to Translate] • Another Loss

  Under the Tree • Grafting • The Orchard of Worlds • The Debt of Sleep • A Remembrance • The Cullers Come

  Into a Dream • Early Days • Harmonizer • Crypsis • A Thousand Worlds • Apophenia

  Finally, a City • Something Wrong with the Moon • Hothouse • Two Psychedelic • A Descent • Minna Gets Dirty

  A Mushroom Garden • Crypsis Again • Predators and Pests • Tourists • Not the Same as Forever

  Gardens • A City That’s Not Visibly on Fire • Shopping Trip • Partners • New Skin • A Foreboding

  Good Drugs • A Hot Shower • An Intrusion • Some of Your Blood • An Old Friend • Enter Polly

  Traps • Poor Butterflies • Cages and Pits • Summoning Circle • Last Ones • Here to Help

  Starving • Cornucopia • A Descent • Six Hundred Cycles Late • A Favor • The New Ones

  Farewells • The Lighthouse • Vast and Cool • Implications • A Gem • Minna the Jeweler

  Do You Sleep? • A Crystal World • An Interesting Hypothesis • A Voracious Reader • Weeds and Perennials • Unwelcome Arrivals

  Run or Hide or Something Else • The Pit • Wildlife Preserve • A Temptation • Negotiations • Bad Faith

  Smashing Things • You Go On Ahead • A Pink Bubble • A Gentleperson Naturalist • Slugs • How Interesting

  A Moment of Privacy • Soil Remediation • Hopeful, Not Haphazard • Cousins • A Bit Earthy • Plan B

  Engine Room • Metal Rain • Gladius Touches Down • A Rescue • A Common Language

  Cultural Immersion • It Never Ends • We Do What We Can Do • Familiar Stars • A Dream • A Bed of Flowers

  Sleeping Lectors Lie • The Agony of Uncertainty • The Singular and the Collective • Engine of Despair • World 85 • The Needle

  The Linguistic Virus • Holding Forth • Braided Worlds • Scanned • Theories • Answers in the Blood

  The Notebook • A Cure for Loneliness • Sleeping Together • The Land of the Terrible Terrariums • The Last World

  A New Scribe Takes Up the Pen • 1111 • A Locked Room • Falling Every Way at Once • Orbiting a Dead World • No More Negotiations

  Separation, Anxiety • Blood and Marrow • A Logistical Problem • Another Handshake • Twenty Worlds • The Point of Revenge

  Zax in Despair • Zax Indifferent • Zax Gets Drunk • Zax Stays Drunk • Zax Gets High • Zax Considers His Options

  A Monster • An Account of the Mind-Fall • Reunion • Hitting Yourself • A Head Full of Vines

  Zax Writes • A Mind Inside a Memory • Poison Garden • Growing Things • Servitude

  Cuttings • The Polyp • A Garden of a Million Flowers • Slaps, and Hits, and Kicks • A Resurrection • Alone in the Dark

  Minna Alone • Grafting • A Spy • Treasures in the Ice • The Moveable Empire • He Brings the War

  The Banner of the Lector • Seneschals • The Armies of Empire • Blood, Blood, Blood • Assassin • Giving Up

  Zax Decides • Council of War • Brain Surgery with a Dirty Stick • Awake Forever • Glory to Those Who Sleep

  A Quiet Meal • Delirium • Death or Exile • Half Asleep • Be Appeased • Fleeing the Collectorium

  Enter the Pilgrim • Empty of God • An Alliance • Into the Wreck • Ring of Hell • The Waiting

  Epilogue

  Sniper Fire • The Lector Dances • Slugs in the Garden • The Skeleton’s Name • Implosive • Zax in the Box

  A Conversation Between Old Friends • Biting Down • Stabbed • Worms in the Apples • Infinite Time • The Falls

  The Feasting Hall • A Musing on the Causes of Madness • Who’s Asking? • The Chariot

  Acknowledgments

  A Parting of the Ways • The What, If Not the Why • A Dark Sea • Enter Minna • [Unable to Translate] • Another Loss

  I yawned – one of those bone-cracking yawns so immense it hurts your jaw and seems to realign the plates of your skull – and staggered against the bar. I was on the third level of the uppermost dome, where the mist sommelier, clad only in prismatic body glitter, puffed colored, hallucinogenic vapor from the pharmacopeia in their lungs directly into the open mouths of their patrons. I turned my face away before catching the overspill from the latest dose: a stream of brilliant green meant for a diminutive person covered in downy fur the same shade as the smoke. I didn’t have much time left; sleep was coming for me, and I wanted to meet it in my right mind.

  I stumbled down the ramps that spiraled through the glittering domes of the Dionysius Society, looking for Laini. The glowing bracelet on my wrist flashed different colors when I came into proximity with people I’d partied with during the preceding five days, and I followed the wine-red flash toward a cl
uster of dancers on a platform under dazzling dappled lights. Other partygoers bumped into me and jostled my battered old backpack, something everyone stared and laughed at here. In a post-scarcity pleasure dome, where anything you desired could be instantiated just by asking your implanted AI to produce it, the sight of someone actually carrying stuff was unprecedented. The locals had all decided I was an eccentric, or someone affecting eccentricity to stand out from the crowd. Standing out from the crowd was almost a competitive sport here.

  The locals couldn’t even imagine all the ways I really stood out. For one thing, I didn’t have an implanted AI, something everyone in this world received in their gestation-pods. I didn’t have local tech because I wasn’t a local. I hadn’t been a local any place I’d been for a very long time.

  “Laini!” I shouted once I got close, and, though the music was loud, my voice was louder. Before I left home, swept away by forces I still don’t understand, I was trained to mediate conflict, and while mostly I did that by speaking calmly, sometimes it helped to be the loudest person in the room. Laini’s shoulders, bare in a filmy strapless gown the color of a cartoon sun, tensed up when I shouted – I’m trained to notice things like that, too – but she didn’t turn around. She was pretending she couldn’t hear me.

  So. I’d been through this sort of thing before, but it never stopped hurting.

  I pushed through the dancers – they were human, but many were altered, with decorative wings or stomping hooves or elaborate braids made of vines. In techno-utopian worlds, those things were as common as pierced ears or tattoos back home… though this place wasn’t as utopian as some. In my week here I’d come to realize the aerial domes of the Dionysius Society were home to the perpetual youth of a ruling class floating above a decidedly dystopian world below. It was lucky Laini and I had awakened up here in the clouds. Anyone walking around in the domes was assumed to belong here, since there was no getting in past the guards and security measures from the outside.

  Though if we had awakened below, with the dirt and the smoke and the depredations of “the Adverse,” whatever those were, I probably wouldn’t have lost Laini the way I was about to. I’d accidentally brought her to a world that was too good to leave.

  I reached out and touched Laini’s shoulder, and she turned, scowling at me, green eyes in a pinched face under short black hair. I was the whole reason she was here, and she clearly wished I would go away. I would leave – I had no choice – but I deserved a goodbye, at least, didn’t I? I touched my borrowed bracelet and put an exclusion field around us, a bubble of silence and privacy on the dance floor.

  “I’m fading.” I blinked, and even that was an effort. My eyes were leaden window shades, my breathing deeper with every passing moment, and there was a distant keening sound in my ears. I knew the signs of incipient exhaustion. They had excellent stimulants in that world, but even with my metabolic tweaks, staying awake for five days straight was about my limit.

  “Zax… I don’t… I’m sorry… I just…” I could have helped her, said what she was thinking so she didn’t have to, but I stubbornly made her speak her own mind. “I like it here,” she said finally. “I’ve made friends. I want to stay.”

  I liked her a little better for being so direct about it, and at least this way there was a sort of closure. My last companion before Laini, Winsome, had gotten lost in the depths of the non-Euclidean mansion where we landed, and I couldn’t stay awake long enough to find them again. (Unless, I thought darkly, they’d abandoned me deliberately, too, and just wanted to avoid an awkward goodbye.) I couldn’t blame Laini for wanting to stay here, either. She’d come from a world of hellish subterranean engines: the whole planet a slave-labor mining operation for insectile aliens, and this playground world of plenty was a heaven she could never have imagined in her old life – the one I rescued her from. We’d been together for forty-three worlds though, the longest I’d kept a companion since the Lector, and it hurt to see her choose this place over me. We didn’t even get along that well, honestly; she was suspicious, quick to anger, and secretive – all reasonable traits for someone who’d grown up the way she did – but that didn’t matter. For a little while, I’d woken up next to someone I could call a friend, and, in my life, that’s the most precious thing there is.

  She touched my cheek, which surprised me – we’d been intimate a few times, but only when she came to me in the night, and it was always rough and hot, never afterward discussed or acknowledged. She’d certainly never touched me with that kind of fondness. “I’m sorry, Zax,” she said, and that surprised me even more, and then she kissed me, gently, which stunned me completely. Maybe a week in a place of peace and plenty, with its devotion to pleasure as a pillar of life, had softened her.

  Or maybe she was just feeling the all-encompassing love-field brought on by some rather advanced club drugs.

  “OK.” I turned away so she wouldn’t see the tears shining in my eyes and made my way across the dance floor, stumbling a little as lethargy further overtook me. I glanced back, once, and Laini was dancing again, having already forgotten me, no doubt. I tried to be happy for her, but it was hard to feel anything good for someone else in the midst of being sad for myself.

  I opened up a cushioned rest pod and crawled inside. At least I’d fall asleep in a pleasant place. I curled myself around my backpack – stuffed with as many good drugs as I’d been able to discreetly pocket – and succumbed to the inevitable.

  Here’s the situation. Every time I fall asleep, I wake up in another universe. That started happening nearly three years and a thousand worlds ago, and I still don’t know why, or what happens during the transition, while I’m asleep. Do I spend eight hours in slumber in some nowhere-place between realities, or do I transition instantaneously, and just feel like I got a good night’s sleep? I wake up feeling rested, unless I took heavy drugs to knock myself out, and if I fall asleep injured, the wounds are always better than they should be when I wake up, if not fully healed. I inevitably sleep through the mechanism of a miracle, and that’s just as frustrating as you might imagine.

  I never have dreams anymore, but, sometimes, waking up is a lot like a nightmare.

  After leaving Laini, I woke to flashing red lights and the sound of howling alarms. I automatically pressed the sound-dampening button on my bracelet, but it was just an inert loop of metal and plastic now that the network of the Dionysius Society was in another branch of the multiverse, so the shriek was unceasing.

  I sat up, looking around for obvious threats – always a priority upon waking. I was in some kind of factory or industrial space, on a metal catwalk, near a ladder leading up, and a set of stairs leading down. I stood and looked over the metal railing to see gouts of steam, ranks of silvery cylinders stretching off in all directions, and humans (humanoids, anyway) racing around and waving their arms and shouting. One of the workers, if that’s what they were, stumbled into contact with a steam cloud, and screamed as their arm melted away.

  I’d be going up the ladder instead of down the stairs, then. I tightened my pack on my shoulders and scrambled up the rungs. Fortunately the hatch at the top was unlocked so I didn’t have to use one of my dwindling supply of plasma keys. I climbed up onto the roof, and the hatch sealed shut after me.

  I stood atop a mining or drilling platform, several hundred meters above a vast, dark ocean. The sun was either rising or setting, and everything was hazed in red. The air was smoky and vile, but breathable. I’ve never woken up in a world where the air was purely toxic, though sometimes I find myself in artificial habitats in otherwise uninhabitable places. My second companion, the Lector, theorized that I projected myself into numerous potential realities before coalescing in a branch of the multiverse where my consciousness could persist… but I’ve always been more interested in the practice of my affliction than the theory, and was just happy I’d survived this long.

  The water far below was dark and wild, more viscous than most seas I’ve seen, as if thic
kened by sludge, and the waves slammed hard against the platform from all directions. Occasionally dark shapes broke the surface – giant eels, I thought at first, with stegosaurus spines, but then I glimpsed some greater form in the depths below, and realized the “serpents” were the appendages of a single creature.

  The thing in the water wrapped a limb around one of the cranes that festooned the platform and pulled it down into the water with a terrific shriek of metal and a greasy splash, and the whole rig lurched in that direction. The creature grabbed more cranes at their bases and began to pull, trying to rip the whole platform down.

  I’d seen enough. I try to save people when I can – I was trained, on the world of my birth, to solve conflicts and promote harmony – but there are limits. If anyone had burst through the hatch after me I’d have given them the option to escape this world, but there was no time to rescue anyone without losing myself. I fumbled in my pack and pulled out a stoppered test tube (my second-to-last) and a handkerchief. I was still bitter about the limitations of the pharmacopeia in the Dionysius Society. They had uppers, and dissociatives, and euphorics, and entheogens, and entactogens, but they didn’t have any fast-acting sedatives. Who wanted to fall asleep and miss the party?

  I yanked out the cork and poured the carefully measured tablespoon of liquid into the handkerchief, strapped my pack back onto my chest, and then lay down on the metal of the deck. The rig was already sloping noticeably toward the water, but not so much that I’d slide into the sea before I passed out. I hoped.

  I pressed the soaked handkerchief to my nose and breathed deeply. A strong, sickly-sweet odor filled my nostrils, my head spun, everything got gray and fuzzy, and then that terrible world went away.

  I woke sprawled underneath a tree, its branches heavy with unfamiliar apple-shaped fruit in an unlikely shade of blue. My head thudded like it always did when I woke after resorting to such anesthetic measures. I sat up against the trunk and did my threat assessment.

  I was in an orchard of blue-apple trees, orderly rows stretching as far as I could see, and there were no sea monsters (or tree monsters) in evidence. The air smelled fresh and highly oxygenated, and the skies were a paler blue than the fruit, and cloudless.