The Portal in the Forest (6 page)
one ocular organ from any
source |
three liters of
Xenon
The hell? I kept my face straight and calm,
not wanting to betray any information to this… entity. Could the
questions be an attempt to determine which universe I came from? If
I expressed confusion over the Battle of Long Island, or the rarity
of Xenon… would that give something away? I could just barely
recall that Xenon was present at about 1 parts per million in the
atmosphere, meaning that collecting three liters of it would
require… 3 million liters of air… was that actually doable? I
wasn't sure.
"May I return after I have gathered payment?"
I asked.
"You may."
I paused halfway across the room. "Does my
time of safety run down while I am gone?"
The woman watched me with a neutral
expression. "Yes."
I took that as a cue to run the next twenty
feet. Once back through the portal, I took only enough time to give
an order to my second. He frowned, but ran off at top speed.
A few moments of sprinting later, I was back
in the chair, the two offers still before me. Alright, what next?
What else could I do in the time allotted?
Of course!
I lifted the book, and moved to open it.
The woman made a noise, and her face
reflected a very subtle fear - the first emotion I'd seen at all.
"A piece of free advice: if you open that device here, it will be
seen as an act of hostility, violating our truce."
I froze, my fingers on the cusp of the cover…
but I hadn't missed her use of the word
device
rather than
book.
"Why?" I sat a little taller. "Wait, rather: what does
the book do?"
Taking a moment to regain her composure, the
bespectacled woman adjusted her sweater, pushed up her glasses, and
then slid another paper toward me, resting it next to the other
two.
|
|
one human soul
Growing agitated, I leaned forward. "Why are
two of the options blank?"
"If you knew what the options were," the
woman answered calmly. "It would give you vital information you
haven't paid for."
"So I'm just supposed to
guess
what my
payment options are?"
"You can guess, or you can pay to know what
the payment options are."
"Alright, what's the price to know the first
payment option?"
She slid a fourth piece of paper forward. It
had only one option.
your ability to
love
I wavered in place for a moment, stunned to
my very core. "You can take that?" I whispered.
"Yes, if offered as payment."
"Does it… extend to existing emotions, or
just new ones?"
"All emotions of love would be included, and
any consequent emotions you have as a result of those
emotions."
I could, I
could…
it would be so
easy…
Footsteps clattered across the smooth marble
floor behind me, and my second approached at speed, his goal in
hand and wrapped in a thick layer of leaves. "Got it!" he cried,
plopping down the dead bird we'd seen on our run. It squished onto
the surface of the clean white desk under its own weight.
The woman did not seem amused, but she took
the relevant offer paper, the corpse, and its ocular organ - and
placed them in a drawer. "Payment accepted. The question was: why
are your shoes valuable? The answer is: because something of value
is stuck to them. To be exact, dirt from a very specific
reality."
Shoes
, plural. That was extremely
valuable information. Did the entity behind this marionette realize
what it'd just given away?
I slipped off both shoes, intent on trading
away one and keeping the other. I lifted the left shoe, but the
woman did not react; I lifted the right shoe, and she still did not
react. It seemed either shoe would do. Gently, I sat one shoe on
the first offer paper, and she took the paper and the shoe both and
placed them in a drawer.
"The question was: Can I destroy this book?
The answer is: no."
I stood at that. "You'd have taken my
hand
for
that answer?
"
She did not seem threatened by my sudden
anger. "Offers are offers. The game is the game. Your time is half
gone, and little profitable trading has been done. I suggest you
make wiser choices."
Muttering epithets, I sat again.
My second stood behind me, watching in
confusion and concern. "What does she want?"
My frustration suddenly cleared. Of course!
I'd been going about this all wrong. I'd been asking questions
about the book, and not about the
woman
, or the entity
behind her. "Yes," I echoed. "What do you want?"
Another paper slid forward, coming up
adjacent to the two remaining but untenable offers. This one had
four options for payment, but all were blank. "Of course…"
"The game is the game," she offered,
unprompted.
I switched tact. "How do we neutralize the
threat this book poses?"
The resulting offered page contained no
payment options at all. She bowed her head slightly.
That wasn't a promising sign.
Feeling my time diminishing to vanishing
slimness, I struggled for something… anything… what wasn't I
seeing?
I looked up. "What does this device look like
objectively?" I asked, holding up the book.
"That one is free," the woman answered with a
light smile. "As it serves both our interests for you to know."
The final paper slid across her desk.
I moved to roll it up without looking at it,
but I wasn't quick enough. My second glanced down from his higher
standing vantage point. I heard him gurgling painfully before I
could react.
Blood spattered across my face, and across
the desk before me. I leapt up and caught him as he fell, and
gently lowered him to the ground as crimson leaked from his open
eyes and mouth. He began seizing and thrashing violently, and I
held him down as best I could while I turned my head to glare
daggers at the woman. "Fix him!"
She began to reach for another paper.
"No bullshit!" I shouted. "If you can fix
him, do it -" I hesitated. If the entity here had wanted to give me
information that was beneficial to both of us, why hadn't it simply
done so? Was it far more strictly bound by our game than it let on?
"- or I won't leave."
"Your time is almost up," she replied
flatly.
"The truce isn't for
my
safety," I
shot back, gambling the boy's life on a guess. "It's for
yours
. And this…" I looked down at him as his seizing began
to slowly fade into dying. "You'll offer me a choice to heal him,
and one of the payment options will be
leave.
Then we'll go
our separate ways. That's your last resort, isn't it? No matter. If
you don't give me that deal, I'll stay here, with that device and
all its danger, consequences be damned."
The woman stopped completely for a full four
seconds, all blinking, breathing, and shifting completely stilled.
When she resumed moving, she slid a paper forward. As I'd thought,
all of the choices offered had been premeditated, and this one, for
healing the boy, had
leave
as the only payment option.
Rolling up the objective image of the book
without looking at it, and dragging my second by his shoulders, I
pulled him quickly across the room as the sixteen minutes and eight
seconds reached its end and the white walls began to dissolve into…
seething masses of what looked like brain tissue.
I kept going until I could lay him out on
forest leaves, but his blood was already receding back into his
body. A light green glow hovered around his head, probably purging
the memories of what he'd seen. A tide of children poured down from
the safety of the hill, now eager to hear what had happened.
I looked up as the portal began to flicker
back toward the day's original destination - the corpse-filled sky
and its deadly inexplicable filaments that had choked an entire
world of people and drawn them up into the clouds to die
together.
The woman at the other end of the
disappearing room screamed silently and struggled against chains of
neural tissue… and, then, the image was gone. It hadn't occurred to
me that the entity's puppet might really have been a human being.
That could explain why subtle phrasings she'd used had given away
so much vital information. She might have been trying to help me
the only way she could. Had I had a chance to save her, and missed
it?
But, of course, that was what it wanted:
regret. The entire encounter had been designed to fill me with hurt
and regret, or at least enhance what was already there. I'd heard a
tale, just once, of a Regret Demon that offered trades for which
every option, including doing nothing, would lead to remorse. It
was called a Demon because it was bound by very strict behavior,
not because it was necessarily related to religion… but the Regret
part I now knew was exactingly true.
The ability to love… and all consequent
emotions and pains…
"What happened?" he asked, waking with bleary
eyes.
I held the book in one hand, and the rolled
up paper in the other. "We got something very valuable," I told
him.
He sat up weakly, his face full of concern.
"What did you trade for it?"
"Peace," I replied quietly, unwilling to
elaborate further. Another innocent had almost died because of me,
and the risk was only going to grow. I looked past the children
crowded 'round and saw Thomas still training his iWorker. What
right did I have to risk the lives of these kids? Was I training
them just to foolishly face the unknown and die, just like
before?
At that thought, the ground trembled slightly
underfoot - and the left side of the portal began to rip further
out into the woods. I watched, stunned, as several trunks ruptured,
exploded, and collapsed as the trees above fell. The wound in space
unzipped the very air for another twenty feet - the portal had
grown to three times its previous size.
"What do we do?" my second asked,
terrified.
I had no orders to give. The Regret Demon had
taken something very valuable from me; I found myself uncertain and
wavering. Against forces like these, uncertainty and hesitation
meant death. I knew something had to be done, but I was forced to
admit to someone else, for the first time, that I was lost. "I…
don't know…"
That answer was not the one the children
wanted to hear. They didn't scream, or cry. They remained
absolutely quiet, waiting for someone to take away their fear.
But I couldn't. Not in that moment. I could
only walk away, book and paper in hand. Maybe if I just had some
time to think…
"Where are you going?" my second - no, just
an eighteen-year-old boy - shouted.
I had no answer for him. Instead, I departed,
stumbling mentally if not physically.
Where am I going,
indeed?
Besides the trade I could have made, might
have made, there was the astounding information implicit in one of
the payment option's I'd been given.
One human soul.
That
meant... souls were real. Humans had souls, and souls were real
things. I had a sick, black suspicion that I knew what the book had
been doing all this time.
But, first, it was time to see what it
really
looked like...
I awoke instantly, my senses blazing. By
rote, I traced back the sound still caught in my auditory sensory
memories: a creaking floorboard.
My eyes were already locked on him as he came
around the corner in the dark. He didn't see me for several
seconds. A little jump signified the moment he became aware of my
silhouette sitting against the wall.
"You're hard to find," Thomas breathed,
nervous.
I nodded, aware that he could see my outline
by the vague glow of house porchlights outside. "By design. Never
let the enemy know where you sleep."
He hesitated. "What enemy?"
A heavy sense of reality descended upon me,
and I entertained a light disappointment in myself. "None, I guess.
It's hard to leave behind certain paranoias."
"My big sister went to war," he said. "She…
came back a lot like you."
The kid was wiser than his years. I had to
give him that. I could only nod again.
He came and sat beside me in the dark. "I've
been looking for you for hours. I had no idea there were so many
abandoned houses in the neighborhood."
"That's half the reason I've stuck around
here so long," I laughed quietly. "One world falls apart, and
another seeps into the cracks." My own words gave me pause; like
some kind of accidental prophecy. I'd only been speaking of his
suburb, overworked parents, and inequality-strained society, but
the words themselves reflected something of our conflict with the
portal.
"What's the other half?" he asked.
"What?"
"The other half of the reason you stay."
"Oh." I stared around the empty shadow-lit
room for several seconds. I'd been running from it for so long… it
felt like time to release my wound; cleanse my infection. Recent
events had permanently damaged my internal armor. The scars I'd
built up had been stripped away, leaving raw, bleeding pain in
their stead. "I had a daughter once. She was about your age when
she… well."
It was his turn to say it. "Oh." He took
three deep breaths, not sure what to say. "What was she like?"
"Tough," I admitted. "Awesome, really. She
had simply endless willpower, and always found a way through every
problem in life. She grew up to be very pretty, too, even despite
the condition she was in."
He made a confused noise. "I thought
she-"
