Doors of Sleep Read online

  I leaned back against the trunk and exhaled. My breath still smelled sweet from the anesthetic. There are sedatives that don’t give me skull-shattering hangovers, but they also work more slowly. Sometimes I need to spin the wheel of worlds again fast, and in those cases, I resort to the hard stuff.

  “Where did you come from?” a voice above me said. So much for my operational security. I looked up at a human perched on a large branch, looking down at me – apparently female, around my age, with big dark surprised eyes, skin a shade browner than the trees, and hair in a thousand braids.

  “The ocean,” I said, and the language I spoke was strange and harsh. Back home we had a simple, logical, constructed language, but these haphazard, organically developed languages are far more common in the multiverse. (That informality has infiltrated even my thoughts, and the way I write now would horrify my tutors.) Still, it was good to know the linguistic virus the Lector injected into me way back on World 85 still worked. For the first few months after the onset of my condition, before I met the Lector, I had only once visited a world where people spoke a language I remotely recognized. It’s harrowing, waking up every day or three in an entirely alien place, where even if you find people, you can’t understand them. (Not that my days now were much better. Laini had been grim company for most of our time together, but she had, at least, been a brief constant in my ever-changing world: someone who knew me for more than a day or two and then vanished into my past forever.)

  “The sea-stead?” she asked. “The seaweed beds?”

  “It was more a sort of… factory.”

  “I have never seen even once an ocean,” she said, with a note of wistfulness. “I have never been off the farm.” (Maybe that should be “The Farm.”)

  “It wasn’t a very nice ocean. Are these fruit good to eat?” I was starving, and while I had some food in my pack, I tried to avoid depleting my rations whenever possible. I never knew when I’d hit a streak of barren or unpopulated worlds and have to dip into my supply.

  “Of course! I can share some of my fraction with you. I am Minna. Senior grafter here, but this is my free half-day. What are you called?”

  “Zax.” Zaxony Dyad Euphony Delatree – given name, family name, earned name, sphere name, but none of that had meaning except in the Realm of Spheres and Harmonies, and I hadn’t been there since I was twenty-two. I thought about the family, friends, and lovers I’d unwillingly left behind as seldom as possible, for the same reason I don’t shove pointy sticks into any wounds I sustain. “I’m a… traveler.”

  “I did not know that was the name of a job.” Minna looked at me very seriously. “Do the [unable to translate] send you to the different biomes to make sure all is right and well?”

  I didn’t hear the words “unable to translate,” just slippery syllables. The Lector’s world was techno-utopian, and occasionally there were concepts the linguistic virus he’d developed had a hard time parsing. Usually those concepts involved horrible nightmarish things. “Something like that.”

  “Tell me of the places you have seen!” Minna hung on my every word as much as she hung onto the branch.

  I looked around the orchard. “Places with no trees at all,” I said, “just rocks, but some of the rocks grow, like trees, and they shine. Places with just one big tree, and a city in the branches. Forests where no person had ever walked before me. Beaches with white or golden or black sand, or all three at once, the water warm or chilling or bubbling or even, once, alive. Mountains with air so clear and crisp you can see for hundreds of miles, and mountains where the fog never lifts and the inhabitants are all born blind. Cities so big you could walk all day and never reach the outskirts, full of temples and factories, towers and parks.” I tried to focus on the good trips. I could have told Minna about places where the sun was a dying ruby, where people were just vessels for intelligent parasites, where the trees were carnivorous and ambulatory, but why frighten and confuse her?

  “Really? So many places, all different? What a life, so full of wonders. You must be a rare lineage from heirloom stock.”

  “I don’t know about that. Traveling is… it’s like life, I guess. Sometimes it’s wonderful, and sometimes it’s terrible, and sometimes it’s boring.”

  “That does not sound like life as I know it.” Minna dropped down from the branch and landed beside me. She wore a jumpsuit dyed unevenly blue, and her hands were stained the same color. She’d plucked a fruit on the way down, and began cutting up the blue apple with a pretty silver knife. She handed me a thick wedge of fruit. It was blue all the way through. “Here you go. The fruit in this sector boosts your immunities. We are going to graft them to mood enhancers, to make the eaters feel good and be healthy too, but the [unable to translate] have not yet settled on which strains to use.”

  I grunted and took a bite. The flesh was crisp and sweet, and I gobbled it up and licked my fingers.

  “Golly, you hungered.” Minna handed me the rest of the fruit, and I chomped it down.

  “Thank you for that. Do you live nearby?” I’d eaten, and now it would be nice to get under a roof. I’d been in too many places where terrible things came from the sky.

  “I live on the Farm.” Minna sounded confused that I’d even asked. “Did you want to see my room? Is that part of the inspection?”

  Before I could answer – I was debating whether it was better to let Minna think I had special status here or not – a horrible buzzing, humming, clattering noise arose, and I shot to my feet and looked around. “What is that?”

  “A harvester.” Minna smiled. “Is this your first time on a farm? They might be loud and scary, I think, if you are new, but they mean you no harm.”

  A mechanical spider ten meters high rose up above the trees to my left, its body a silvery sphere, its countless arms whirling and spinning, some tipped with blades, others with jointed claws, plucking fruit and pruning back branches all at once, tossing blue apples and cut branches into a funnel on top of its body. The harvester came closer, its delicate segmented legs stepping over, around, and through the branches, moving fast. I snatched up my pack and backed away.

  “Do not be afraid. The harvester has scanners, and it can tell workers from fruit.”

  I hesitated, but Minna seemed so unworried that I stood beside her as the spider scuttled down the rows toward us. The machine didn’t seem to notice me at all, and it was almost past us when one of its lopping pincer arms reached out and severed my left arm just above the elbow.

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

  I fell, and everything went gray, but I bit my own tongue and willed myself to stay awake. If I passed out now, I might well bleed out wherever I woke, unless I happened to open my eyes in a trauma center, which wasn’t likely. Here, at least, Minna might be able to do some first aid, make a tourniquet or something – farm people knew about that stuff, didn’t they?

  That all sounds so logical and deliberate, as I write it down after the fact. Actually I was screaming and bleeding and terrified. Minna said something my virus translated as “Gosh!” and then the pain at my elbow went away, replaced by spreading coolness. I turned my head, heavy as a cannonball, and saw Minna rubbing a cut piece of yellow fruit on my wound. My gaze drifted downward and I watched the bleeding end of my arm close over, new flesh growing across the wound in seconds. I was maimed, but I wouldn’t bleed to death. I was dopey and vague, though, and Minna started to push something into my mouth, another piece of fruit. A sedative? I turned my head. “Can’t sleep. Have to stay awake.”

  She paused. “Oh. Then… I can give you something that will take you far away from your body, without making you sleep. OK?”

  “But sleeping does take me far away. Every time. Always.” I was lightheaded from blood loss.

  “Eat this, Zax.” The slice of fruit she put in my mouth tasted like copper and clouds.

  I’d done enough drugs on enough worlds t
o recognize Minna had given me a strong dissociative, but the thing about dissociatives is, when you’re on them, you don’t care about anything, so I didn’t mind. Minna helped me stand and led me to a tree, then somehow into the tree – the trunk yawned open to admit us. We went down a wooden ramp, into a cozy cavern lit by bioluminescent fungus. The furniture seemed like dirt with soft moss growing on it, and Minna eased me onto a raised platform that could have been a bed or table. She muttered and bustled around, and did some stuff to my stump – ha, I was in a tree and I had a stump – but I was mostly just floating far away, my mind a balloon on a string only tenuously connected to my body.

  After some unknowable interval, Minna helped me sit up and gave me a squishy bulb of juice to sip. Lucidity flooded back into me when I swallowed. I looked down at my arm. My arm. Hadn’t I lost that arm? Oh. This was a different arm. It was brown, and there was a leaf growing on the thumb.

  Minna plucked off the leaf, and it felt like having a long hair plucked from my eyebrow. “Move your fingers,” she said.

  My hand looked like my hand, but made of wood. I opened and closed the fingers, and they worked fine. I ran the fingers across the table. There was sensation, but dulled, like I was wearing thick mittens. “I can feel.”

  “The feeling should get better when the nerves have time to get used to each other.” Minna sighed. “I am sorry it looks like an arm made of wood and not an arm made of you. I do not have the right material to make it look better here. You could go get… but no.” Minna took a step away from me when I sat up.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  Minna shook her head. “You are an impossible thing. You cannot be here. I inspected you.” She rubbed the back of her neck. “You do not have a chit. That is why the harvester lopped you. It scanned you, but there was nothing to scan, so it did not know you were a person.”

  “What kind of chip?”

  “A chit. Everyone has a chit, right here, to keep them in their right place and track the outstanding debt owed to [unable to translate]!”

  “Everyone? What if you pay off your debt?”

  Minna shook her head. “It never goes down, only up, maybe flat if you work fast enough. You incur more debt just by breathing [unable to translate]’s air. My chit has eleven thousand outstanding. I inherited my mother’s debt when she died, and my children will inherit mine in their turn.”

  I shuddered. Indentured servitude. Slavery, really. Then I blinked. “Did you say you have children?” I looked around her small dwelling and saw no sign of them.

  She nodded, smiling faintly. “Two. They ripened long ago, and were assigned to a sea-stead. I had hoped they would remain here, but there were losses in an aquatic biome during a volcanic event, and because my line is good at adapting, my sons were repurposed and re-assigned.” She fluttered her hands at the side of her neck and I looked at her blankly. “They have gills now. When you said you had come from the ocean, I wondered if you knew them…” She sighed. “It was foolishness.”

  I radically revised my estimate of Minna’s age and experience. Her seeming innocence was due to isolation, I realized, and not youth. I’d been to worlds where centenarians looked like teenagers, where the old could take a pill to restore them to youth and allow them to grow up all over again, where bodies could be changed as easily as shirts, but I still fell prey to my own assumptions. The Lector called it “cultural programming.”

  “How old are you, Minna?”

  “This will be my eighty-third harvest.”

  “How many harvests in a year?”

  “What is a year?” She cocked her head curiously.

  “It’s… nothing. A measure of time from another place. What about the father?” This cavern definitely looked like singles accommodation to me.

  “The paternal contribution came from a rootstock engineer in a frost biome, or so I was told,” she said. “We were a good genetic combination.”

  “Ah. Right. I see.”

  She put her hand on the back of my neck. “You do not have a chit.” Her voice was full of fear and wonder. “Everyone has a chit.”

  “You’ve never been off the Farm, though, Minna. I come from a place where things are different.”

  “Not just different. Impossible.” Minna shook her head, braids whipping around. “Even if you are some… outsider… there is no way onto the Farm without a chit. The entire perimeter is one big scanner. No one can enter this biome without authorization.”

  “Maybe I… parachuted in.”

  “Through the dome?”

  Ah. I hadn’t realized there was a dome. Invisible dome, or maybe one decorated with the illusion of a sun and sky. “OK. Truth time.” Minna had saved my life, so I owed her that much, even if she wouldn’t believe me. “When I said I was a traveler, Minna… do you know what a multiverse is?”

  “A… song with lots of verses?”

  I smiled. “No, it’s like… Imagine the universe is a tree. When the universe was born, it just had a single central trunk. But as time went on, the universe grew branches, and those branches grew more branches, and so on, and all those branches bore fruit. Now imagine each fruit at the end of each branch is a whole different world. Not just a different planet, but an entirely separate universe. Some worlds are similar, and some are different, like… aren’t there trees that can grow more than one kind of fruit, pears and apples both at once?” I’d seen trees like that before. I didn’t know if that was super-science or just agriculture, but in this world, either seemed likely.

  Minna nodded, frowning.

  “Right. So… I can travel from branch to branch in the tree of worlds, sampling all the different fruit. And… occasionally I jump from the end of one branch to another tree entirely, one with totally different kinds of fruit. Like a squirrel.”

  “What is a squirrel?”

  “My metaphor might be breaking down,” I said. “My point is, I don’t travel to different, whatever you said, biomes, in this world. I travel between worlds. I never know where I’ll end up. This time, I landed here, with you. I don’t know what the Farm is, I don’t know what the–” here I reproduced the “unable to translate” sound as best I could, “–is or are, and I’m really just passing through.”

  I’ve gotten a lot of reactions to my story over my travels, usually disbelief or mockery, but a few reacted like Minna did: with a look of envy and desire. “You mean, you can just… leave? Without permission or cause?”

  “I can… but I’ve never been back to any world I’ve visited before. Once I go, it’s gone forever. I can’t choose where I end up, either. I go to new worlds at random, or at least, I haven’t found a pattern or any way to steer. Some worlds are nice, some are boring, and some are terrible and dangerous.”

  “But there is always another world? Another choice?”

  “Choice might be the wrong word. I travel whenever I fall asleep. Even if I find a place I like, I can’t stay there, because I always fall asleep eventually.”

  “We have fruit that lets us stay up working for four nights in a row, but then we have to sleep for almost two,” Minna said. “The debt of sleep must be repaid. If you travel when you sleep… Forgive me, Zax, but are you sure the worlds you visit aren’t dreams?”

  That had been the Lector’s first theory, not definitely disproven for him until I took him with me to another branch. “If they are, this is a dream too.”

  “I am not a dream.” Minna was very solemn. “When you sleep, you will disappear from this place?”

  I nodded.

  “If this is true, you should sleep soon, before the cullers come.”

  “Uh. What are the cullers?”

  Minna shrugged. “They come for sick trees, or sick workers, or unauthorized offspring. I assume they will come for an intruder, though we have never had one before. The harvester has gone back to the center by now, and they will have your arm in their hopper, and they will not find a match to your genome in the database, if you really are a travel
er from branch to branch. They will send a culler for you. And for me, since I helped you.” Minna looked down, tears welling in their eyes. “I am not rotten yet, but they will cull me just the same. If I had scanned you first, and seen you had no chit, I would have known I shouldn’t heal you, but… I think I would have helped you anyway. Grafters are from the sect of cultivators, after all, and we do not kill what can be made healthy and saved. The cullers are less merciful.”

  I clenched my new hand into a fist. “You’ll die?”

  “I will be processed and fed to the trees. This is as it should be. I live for the trees, so I will die for them. Sleep, Zax. Sleep and jump to a new branch in this orchard of worlds, if you can.”

  “Minna, you can come with me.”

  “What?” Her eyes widened, shining.

  “You can’t ever come back, never see your sons again, but if you think they’ll kill you anyway… I can’t let you die just for helping me. If I hold you in my arms when I fall asleep, you’ll come with me. There’s a sort of… bubble, or aura, and it envelops me, and anyone I’m touching, and carries them along. Come with me and we’ll go somewhere…” I couldn’t say “safe,” necessarily. “Else.”

  Soil showered down from the ceiling, accompanied by a grinding, buzzing noise. Minna looked up. “The cullers.”

  Crap. I fumbled in my bag. I only had one vial of knockout juice left, not enough for two, and I knew that, but I looked deeper in the pack anyway, desperate. “I can’t… I can’t put us both to sleep fast, Minna.”

  “I have to sleep, too, Zax? To enter your dream?”

  The first time I took someone with me, on World 40, it was an accident. It was a world heartbreakingly similar to my own, the closest I’ve come to a place that was like mine, so much so that at first I thought I’d made my way home. People spoke a language that was almost the same as mine, at least close enough for me to understand and make myself understood. Like my home, the Realm of Spheres and Harmonies, that world was a place of gleaming spires and plenty, and I landed in a beautiful woman’s back yard. She was the first person I’d been able to talk to in over a month, and I spilled out my story to her, and she believed me, because she’d seen me flicker into existence from nothing.