Thresholder

The SS Farfinder appeared a thousand miles from the surface of Esperide. It wasn’t even remotely in orbit, instead being stationary with respect to the planet, but gravity soon corrected that as it began to drop down the gravity well like a stone.

The captain’s eyes were on the gauges they’d installed toward the front of the ship. There were now seventeen of them, and they were going to have to get something better, or possibly just digitize it all and put it on a screen, but that was one of those things she wished for and knew she’d never find the time to make happen. If everything went well, they would add another gauge soon. Seven of the gauges were up, with the rest down, little ball bearings raised up to press against switches by various means. The captain’s eyes tracked them, trying to untangle what this would mean for the small ship and its crew in the short term, then in the long term.

“We’re falling,” said Eggy. “Actually, falling alarmingly fast.” She was looking at her screens, which were thankfully still working, the ruggedized computer having not broken with the change of physics.

“Engines,” said Captain Hella. “Correct for it.”

“H-class thaumics are down, J-class thaumics are down,” said Nitta, who was really just reading the gauges. Her brow was knitted in concentration. “We can either parachute down or … uh … kick the K-class? Go chemical?”

“Kick the K-class,” said Hella.

“They’re crap,” said Nitta, but she left the bridge anyway, running. The ship was small, with five cramped stations, and the rest of it wasn’t much better, aside from their rooms, which were extradimensional. From the gauges, the local conditions meant that those should still be functional, but nothing vital depended on that being the case.

“Can we shield?” asked Hella. She was trying to take stock of what was available to them. “Tank the impact?”

“No,” said Eggy. “In fact, I’d go so far as to say hell no. Ma’am.”

“Brace for impact?” asked Hella. “Double jump?”

“We don’t even have the punches mapped yet,” said Eggy. “And it’s, um, minutes unless Nitta can get the K-drives working. Bracing isn’t going to do shit.” In spite of that, Eggy was braced for impact, her hands gripping one of the railings hard and her feet straining slightly against the floor. Hella followed suit, because Eggy was the smartest person in the room.

“Nitta, status?” asked Hella.

“On it!” came a call over the radio. “Should be good to go, we haven’t used these in forever, it’s — there!”

The whole ship lurched, and Hella watched out the window as they began slowing their descent. There might be some trouble on the horizon, but it didn’t seem like they were all going to die, not in the near term.

“Eggy, get started on the punch map,” said Hella. “L’onso, start trying to get some sense of what this world is and what might be in it. The planet looks like hell, but it’s hard to say from a distance. Cark, hold tight for the time being. We need to see what we’re dealing with, but this world doesn’t seem like a stopover, and I want to keep up momentum if we can. We’re here for long enough to fill an entry, then we’re off.”

Hella relaxed fractionally when it seemed as though they weren’t going to die. She looked over her ‘crew’, such as they were, and tried to make sure that everything was running smoothly. They came from disparate backgrounds, different worlds, and beyond that, weren’t entirely well-aligned in their interests. They were not, in fact, trained as crew except by the experience accrued on the Farfinder. They were making it work though, and so long as they kept hopping worlds, they were going to be able to get closer to their goal.

Eggy was a thin woman, maybe too thin, and for Hella’s tastes, too overtly feminine. They weren’t a real crew, and didn’t have uniforms or anything like that, with the formality of her captaincy something that they were only reluctantly going along with. That meant that Eggy usually dressed up in floral dresses with heavy makeup, which Hella felt went against every standard of practicality, especially in what often might be classified as a battle scenario. Hella had, thankfully, been able to convince her not to wear a large hat with bundles of flowers on it, at least while on the Farfinder. For her own part, Hella had pants with a lot of pockets and her hair tied up in a tight bun.

L’onso was a red-skinned lizardman, and by contrast, Eggy barely stuck out. He had a long snout, like a crocodile, and when he spoke, it was mostly through articulate nostrils that opened and closed like tiny mouths, though with a thick ridge for articulation rather than teeth. He had small tongues inside there, which she’d peered at once and immediately regretted. They weren’t actually tongues, just a bit of muscle that moved around and looked like a tongue, but it was the oddest thing about him, aside from the fact that he was a lizard.

Nitta and Cark had come as a set, though they were from different worlds. They had been making their way across the multiverse on their own before becoming a part of the Farfinder mission. Nitta was more or less human in appearance, though she had ‘skins’ that she could put on or take off, up to eighteen layers of them that would see her go from a twig of a woman to a hulking giant, at least when that particular brand of magic was working. It wasn’t, for the moment, which meant that she was trapped in her skin, a lithe dark-skinned woman with intense blue eyes. She would be on edge until they moved on, at least from past experience.

Cark was physically rather unexceptional, easy to forget if you came from a world where his muted brown skin tone was common. In his past lives — literal past lives — he had been a spy, a private investigator, and a long range reconnaissance ranger. He was usually the first out of the ship to get boots on the ground, but it didn’t seem like they would be doing much of that, nor did it seem like they would have the tools necessary to go in quietly.

“Three tails on the punch map,” said Eggy, who was frowning at her screen. At least the screens were still working, thank god. They had contingencies for if those failed, but hadn’t done drills in a long time. Hella was the only one who seemed to appreciate the drills.

“A team up?” asked Hella.

“Uh,” said Eggy. “Doesn’t look like a team up, based on this, but if it’s not that, I don’t know. Seems like it might be, uh, something else?”

“What did they do to this planet?” asked L’onso. His screen showed what was below, a planet that seemed to mostly consist of endless deserts on one side and ice on the other. The metal interior of the ship had only a few portholes, all of them small so as to be able to handle exterior pressure well.

“Some planets are like that,” said Hella. “Destroying an entire planet would be more than thresholders should be able to do. Let me see the punch map, Eggy.” She walked over to Eggy’s station, feeling the slight shuddering of the ship as it leveled out. They would hopefully be parked soon enough and more sure of themselves, but the gauges and the punch map would give them some understanding.

Eggy’s screen was a map of the multiverse, with all the unimportant bits taken out. There were, by most estimates, 1.6 million worlds, but accessing them ranged from difficult to impossible depending on local conditions. The map wasn’t a map of where the worlds were in relation to each other, which was so far unknown (if it was even a coherent idea), but rather, a graph showing links between worlds. The largest node was the current world, which they knew nothing about, a dry desert planet being the only thing they could see, and the stars in the background indicating that it was probably of Aleph-class size. The other nodes came off of it. What they were used to seeing were two tails, sometimes more.

“There,” said Eggy, pointing at one of the two tails. It split at the first node. “I don’t know what this is. In a three person team up, there would be three tails. This is two tails, until one of the tails splits. I’m going to need to drill down the base data, not the computer’s interpretation. There’s something going on here. But I don’t think it’s wrong, just unexpected.”

“Two thresholders who teamed up?” asked Hella.

“Even then, how?” asked Eggy. “Going through one after the other wouldn’t do it, they’d end up in different places. Even with a hug, even with other methods, at least from what we’ve seen, same result. There haven’t been that many attempts, granted, not many thresholders who’d actually try to team up, or take someone else through, but of the ones that we have any record of … this represents something rare.”

“Rare, and good,” said Hella.

“Is it good?” asked Eggy. “I mean, doesn’t this mean a lot more potential for destruction?”

“It does,” said Hella. “But it’s one of the things we’ve been looking for, a harness.”

“Assuming that it survived,” said L’onso from over at his station. “Assuming the magic holds.”

“How’s that going, searching for them?” asked Hella. She moved over to his station. There was barely enough room to stand behind him, and then only by leaning against a wedge of metal. By this point, the ship was no longer vibrating, and had gone still. They were hovering over the planet, the engines keeping them in place. They hadn’t had to go to the last resort, the chemical engines, which was good, because that would have been a disaster.

“Still looking,” said L’onso. “We’re weeks behind the end of it.”

“Weeks?” asked Hella. She frowned. “That doesn’t seem right.”

“It’s right,” said Eggy. “We have the gauges, everything is really strong right now. Some of them are going to heal shut, but yeah, I think weeks behind the final fight sounds like it matches what I see.”

“We were behind when we got here,” said Hella. “We were two years behind. How did we catch up? Did they go long?”

“It was a delay,” said Eggy from her station. “Looks like the first one in stuck around for, uh … yeah, two years. Two years before the others showed up.”

“You’re getting that from the gauges?” asked Hella.

“Yeah,” said Eggy. “And I’m pretty sure the first one here has to be the guy we were trying to follow. Eighty percent sure. That’s at least partially based on the punch map. It’s not the king, and it’s not Maya.”

“Peregrin,” said Cark.

Hella rubbed her face. “Do we think that he won this?”

“He did,” said L’onso. “I’m looking at it now.”

Hella moved back over. His screen was showing a fight from one of the crazy angles that he could apparently make sense of. It had been fed into the computer by magical constructs at nothing like the fidelity they were used to. Losing J-class thaumics hurt. “So soon?”

“It’s mostly desert, easier for the algorithms to hone in,” said L’onso. He huffed through his nostrils, which was mostly like a sigh for his people. “The whole world has … maybe fifty thousand people on it?”

“Mmm,” said Hella. “And you’ve found the thresholders?”

“Yes,” said L’onso. “And it looks like Peregrin won.”

“Send me the coordinates,” said Cark. “I need to see what you’re looking at.”

L’onso had a way of looking through the video that made Hella a bit dizzy, so she moved over to Cark’s station instead. Cark always took things slow, and if someone was with him, he announced when he was going to do a change of viewpoint.

“Two weeks, this should be accurate,” said Cark.

“Should be,” nodded Hella.

Their method of investigation was through a piece of magic that worked on most worlds, a complex thing that had been with Hella from almost the start, when the SS Farfinder had been a government project run by her homeworld’s military. Her original crewmates were all dead now, her homeworld a distant memory and likely inaccessible, but the ‘camera’ remained. She was always leery of it, because it didn’t show the past, only a possible past, a plausible explanation for how things had happened. It got a lot of stuff right, but the further back in time it was pointed, the more likely it was to have a fanciful explanation that didn’t match reality. The layer they’d run it through for extra clarity was dead, and a flick of a button had removed it, leaving pretty significant grain.

“Final fight,” said Cark, announcing what was on the screen. He showed a thresholder exploding into a cancerous dragon not too far from the portal. The man from the Great Arc was there, Peregrin, whose trail they were now apparently following. It was a bit of a crapshoot trying to follow a target, but Hella wouldn’t have been gutted if they’d gotten Maya’s trail instead.

“What about the other one?” asked Hella. “He had two opponents?”

“He killed her not long before,” said L’onso. A message popped up on Cark’s console, and after a moment, Cark switched his view over to an ignoble kill in the belly of a cave.

“Hmm,” said Hella. “L’onso, go backward, Cark, go forward, I want to see whether we can figure out this split tail thing. It’s got to be some magic, but neither body seems to have much to it. No obvious device.”

“It could have come from the body,” said Eggy. “I mean, it could be a skill, or some innate ability.”

“Yes,” nodded Hella. “But if it is, then it’s inconsequential. I’m trying to figure out if it’s something that we can use.”

Nitta came back from guts of the ship, wiping off her hands on a long rag that she almost always had tucked in a loop on her jacket. All her clothes were designed for expansion and contraction, and her utility outfit was no different, with belts and buttons that folded in fabric or unfurled for her larger form.

“We should be good,” she said. “But we need to have a talk about the ship’s defenses. This world doesn’t seem suited to it, but we need to be able to survive moving from one world to another without having a moment of crisis every time.”

“That wasn’t a crisis,” said Hella. “You handled it.”

“We absolutely could have slammed into the side of the planet,” said Nitta. “This is why I didn’t want to follow the guy, he’s going to bring less magic with him. We’d be down to chemical engines, and I’m not sure those would have gotten us out of it. We should field test the parachutes next time we get a chance …” She was looking around the ship, making plans in her head. As their chief engineer, she unfortunately had more plans than the time to implement them.

“We could recruit from this world,” said Hella. “Find someone who can deal with the complexity of all this.”

“I don’t think they’re good candidates,” said Cark. “That’s on first blush. High tech, homogenous, I’d expect low adaptability and low expansiveness. We could try, but they also have heavy weapons, and after a thresholder battle, it doesn’t seem like they’d be the most welcoming.”

“We could try by radio,” said Hella. “But I think it’s better to contact the locals only when there’s something to say to them, something to get from them. I want to move on though.”

“We just got here,” said Eggy. “There’s a lot of data to get, and we have to untangle this.”

“The delay was good,” said Hella. “Two years? That means that we’re following a hot trail, not a cold one.”

“You said not to get involved with them,” said Cark. “We’re following the wakes, we’re not pulling up alongside the boat.”

“We know him though,” said Hella. “We’ve seen how he operated on the Great Arc. He’s as close to one of the good ones as we’ve come across, and he’s close. Two weeks, you said? There’s no way that he’ll be out of the next world before we’re ready to go. We extract as much as we can from here, then intervene, make contact with him when we get to the next world.”

“We stay silent here?” asked Cark.

“I think so,” said Hella. “We’ll run some checks on the future. It’s something to bargain with, if he’s got a connection to this place. He’ll want to know, I hope.”

~~~~

The future was guesswork, an imagining of what might happen by a J-class magical construct that was thankfully working. In theory, if they kept on Peregrin’s trail, they would keep being able to use it, but it was far worse than their ability to peer into the past, and was basically useless at conversations and exchanges of information.

They watched seven different futures of Esperide, and did their best to also watch what was happening on the surface in real time. There were colonies of people, who had apparently come from somewhere else, flying in through some faster-than-light system. Their security was, compared to that of the Farfinder, horrendous, their encryptions easily cracked, credentials easily duplicated. There were very few security setups that could withstand what the Farfinder could do though, so Hella didn’t hold it against them.

They were able to extract video of the past as it had actually been, along with recordings of different conversations, and the real prize, a copy of a copy of the artificial intelligence that Peregrin had inside his armor. They didn’t trust it, so it was kept in its own air-gapped computer away from their own computer, but at some future date they might be able to integrate it with their own systems, which were very powerful but also deliberately dumb and without agency.

“You said we were going to be in and out,” said Cark as they ate their fermented vegetables and rehydrated strips of meat over rice. It was all taken from the Great Arc, given that their food maker was down. “I thought that was a good plan, when you said it.”

“Another week here,” said Hella. “I’m still looking for something.”

“Do you have a hint at what you’re looking for?” asked Cark.

“She’s looking for a power,” said Eggy. She was looking with distaste at her meal, which was very similar to every other meal they’d eaten over the last week.

“Do we need more power?” asked Cark. “So long as we understand local conditions, the ship is strong enough to punch through almost anything. We can go toe-to-toe with Peregrin, if we have to.”

“We’re not looking to kill him,” said Hella. “We’re looking to talk with him.”

“Then why the interest in power?” asked Cark.

“It’s part of the pattern,” said Eggy. “Every world, there’s something for the thresholders to grab. We’re at the edges of all kinds of bell curves here, but for there to not be a power would mean certain things about the overspell, things that we really probably should know at some point.”

“So not because we want it for ourselves?” asked Cark.

“No,” said Hella. “Not that we wouldn’t take it, if we could add it to the ship, but this is about fact-finding.”

“We’ve looked at enough to know that if there was something, they didn’t find it,” said Eggy. “That’s soft proof that it wasn’t here.”

“The whole conflict took place over the course of what, a week?” asked Hella. “Peregrin had time to find it, if it existed, and from what we know of him, he would have been after it like a bloodhound.”

“He left the heart,” said Cark. “He might be losing that killer instinct.”

“He’s a thresholder,” said Hella. “Whatever his reasons, he’s still a killer.” She was saying that for her own benefit as much as theirs. If they were planning to make contact, they would need to understand the man that they were making contact with. There were stories told about the thresholders throughout the many worlds, and almost none of them were good. It might have been better to find some idealist, or simply lurk in the multiversal wake that the thresholders left behind when their portals punched through the barriers between worlds, but Hella had become convinced that they needed a confederate.

The maps of the future of this world were optimistic. Peregrin had been guilted into leaving behind tools, and they were working to deorbit a space station, which the prognosis was good on. Eggy had taken a look at their plans and thought that they were pretty solid, both in the near term and in the long term. This had been confirmed by looking at the murky and unsolid futures. The space station would cause a giant crater in the planet when it left, but it would make it back into space, repaired and refitted, ready to take thousands back to their homeworld.

“So,” said Eggy over breakfast one day. “I think it’s time we talk about the Aleph-class worlds. What’s our working theory?”

“I don’t have a theory,” said Cark.

“I don’t have one either,” said L’onso. “But you do, so share it.”

“Well,” said Eggy. “Aleph-class worlds are huge, right?”

“Monstrously so,” said L’onso. He hadn’t believed them when they’d first talked about galaxies. His world would have fit within the borders of a mid-sized country on Hella’s homeworld.

“There’s this disparity, this disconnect,” said Eggy. “Why are they huge? Why are some universes and others just like … a handspan? It makes no sense. Right? And for the thresholders, it really does seem like there are nodes, places within the Aleph-class universes that are just chosen as the prime site, used and reused.”

“That might be because of the geography,” said Hella. “The portal does a punch, which weakens the walls between the worlds. But a punch has a location to it, so after the first, there’s likely a second. And there are selection effects due to the algorithm, which means that certain places are going to be favored. The language thing in particular means that certain worlds are going to get chosen again and again.”

“Where are you going with this?” asked Hella. Eggy had a tendency to get really into the weeds on some theory or bit of trivia, which usually led nowhere.

“I’m saying … the portal could have picked anywhere in this entire universe, which from previous experience should have some kind of life in tons of places all over it. But it picked here,” nodded Eggy. She was eating eggs for breakfast, hard boiled ones that they had pickled. Unfortunately, this world didn’t seem to have much in the way of food, not unless they wanted to trade with the locals.

“I don’t think it’s a case of the portals ‘picking’,” said Nitta. “Or are you saying they pick worlds or pick people or pick places?”

“It’s an exceptional world,” said Eggy. “I mean, an exceptional planet in kind of a standard world. Humans, or close to humans, speaking something close to English, all that is old hat, but with a narrow stripe of habitable land, with native fauna that will attack but not quite wipe out?”

“It’s a Goldilocks thing,” said Hella. She got some blank stares. “It’s a case of something that’s tuned just perfectly to requirements.”

“Right, so that’s my theory on Aleph class,” said Eggy. “Part of their role, part of why they’re included, is that there are lots of chances for the weird and wild.”

Hella frowned. “It’s a theory alright,” she finally said, which seemed diplomatic enough.

“I don’t understand,” said L’onso. “You’re saying that Aleph class worlds are here because they’re big enough to allow a selection of odd things?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Eggy. “It’s something I’ve been thinking about. I mean, there’s a whole universe, but a capital-U Universe, with billions of galaxies and histories and whatever else. It gives a lot to select from. It’s very very different from a world like the Great Arc, which seems big, but is small in comparison.”

“There’s too much we don’t know,” said Hella. “We don’t know how the worlds were created, or selected, or whatever has happened to get us into this mess. We don’t know if the thresholders are the point of everything we see, or just something that someone has done on top of it. We’ve been to many, many worlds now, we have all kinds of tools and skills, and still …”

“Still we’re stuck following in the wake of these portals,” said Cark.

“Yes,” nodded Hella. “Even civilizations with trillions of brilliant scientists haven’t even found the other worlds, let alone been able to punch their own hole. Maybe there’s something to be gleaned from the Alephs, but … I don’t know.”

“Just a thought,” said Eggy. “I do think it warrants more conversation, but maybe we can marinate on it.” She shrugged, but looked a little subdued, as she always did when one of her theories seemed to go nowhere.

They had more questions than answers, as typical.

~~~~

“It’s the bugs,” said Cark. “They have a hive mind.”

“Okay,” said Hella. She leaned over and looked at his monitor. “So? Pheromones, or something else?”

“It’s a fungus,” said Cark. “It doesn’t keep them from attacking each other, especially if there’s a weak link, but some of the behavior we’ve seen can be explained by it. It’s an open mystery to these people, an aspect of biology that they’re not equipped to answer, but it’s there, if you have our tools and you spend some time looking.”

“Mmm,” said Hella. “A … disease?”

“It’s symbiotic,” said Cark. “Hivemind is maybe putting it the wrong way. It’s more … how zombies don’t attack their own. There’s no thought, no overarching goal.”

“This is the power?” asked Eggy, who’d come over to look at the screen.

“I didn’t say that,” said Cark. “I’m just pointing out something interesting about the ecology.”

“But it’s definitely the power,” said Eggy. “I mean, it’s got to be.”

“Could it be?” asked Hella.

“In theory,” said Cark. “It would be like … that world before we started following Maya? With the prawns?”

“Blegh,” said Eggy. “And that was the power there, too, right?”

“It’s not clear to me how this would be a power,” said Cark. “It doesn’t make the jump to humans.”

“Not to normal humans,” said Hella. “But to those three? It would be possible.”

“And what benefit would it confer?” asked Cark. “It’s fairly subtle signaling between people.”

“Subtle under normal circumstances,” said Hella. “Imagine that Peregrin deliberately infected himself with the endemic fungus. Do you think that it would stay subtle for long?”

“No,” said Cark. “I suppose not.”

“But he missed it,” said Eggy. She adjusted the straps of her dress and pursed her lips, which had a bright red lipstick. “I mean they all missed it, and two of them were able to control the bugs.” She bit her lip. “We know the portals are predictive.”

“We think they’re predictive,” said Nitta, who’d come to join the impromptu meeting by Cark’s station. “The actual proof of that is thin on the ground.”

“We have predictive power, and you think the portals don’t?” asked Eggy.

“I’m saying we don’t have proof,” said Nitta. “We can’t just say things that we think sound nice.”

“Save that for later,” said Hella. “Cark, you think we can take it?”

“I think so, yes,” said Cark. “At the very least, we can take one of the smaller insects, put it in a container, and harvest some food from the surface. That would give us a repository of living fungus.”

“I’m still not clear how it’s a power,” said Nitta. “Is it linked to some kind of magic? Or is this mundane, like Peregrin’s power armor?”

“The armor has the fusion reactor,” said Eggy. “It’s not mundane, it wouldn’t work on all worlds without the holes the portal punches.”

“We’ll have to study it more,” said Cark.

“From reading the future, this world is going to be swimming in magic,” said L’onso. He hadn’t moved to join them, though he wasn’t at his own station, and was instead looking at the gauges. “Most of these are going to stabilize. From reading the future, there will be a whole generation of space-faring werewolves. The child has a spirit root.”

“It’s half a baby, not even born,” said Hella. “I don’t trust the tea leaves. At any rate, we should get moving.”

“We still want to meet with him?” asked Cark. “Violate non-interference? Because this is a big step. And from everything we’ve seen, things don’t tend to go well when people get involved with thresholders. I think it’s safer for us to follow in the wake of them, and if we don’t do that, then maybe just be passive observers, but if there is some level of prediction, and it’s good, then it would account for us. We would become a part of it.”

Hella crossed her arms. “It’s a risk that I’m willing to take. We’re in a numbers game, the same one the thresholders are in. Every world we hop to, we run the risk of annihilation. We need one of them, in the flesh.”

Cark tapped on his keyboard and brought up the file they had begun making on Peregrin. It was one they had begun on the Great Arc, which they had come to on the trail of Maya Singh.

He was handsome, but there was something about his look that Hella didn’t like. There was nothing soft about him. He looked like a plant manager making an inspection, all business, and it was a look that he had about him even when he was relaxing. The only time he really looked alive was when he was fighting. He’d shown restraint though, and as far as thresholders went, he wasn’t an ideologue or a sociopath.

“I think it’s time, and this is our guy,” said Hella. “Let’s get ready to follow the punch, within the next day if we can get the bug situation handled. Hopefully he hasn’t burnt the place down by the time we get there.”