zzambrosius_02

Prolog: Some by Dint Some by Doom

“Everything that was once directly lived has receded into a representation.”

—Guy Debord

Ambros Rothakis awoke, in slow stages. At first he could not move: he wondered why and what that meant.

He began to twist and turn, feeling confined. He grunted in frustration and nearly cried out in panic. Then he realized where he was, and why he was restrained.

He wriggled his left hand out of the patch pocket on his pants and pulled the velcro’d flap loose on the other side. He untied his ankles.

Then he sat up and stretched, pushing the sleeping bag down around his waist. He put his legs into full lotus and meditated for a short time, then dragged himself all the way out of the bag and began a more concentrated stretching routine.

As he finished that, he began to shake his head hard, occasionally hard enough to hurt some. He thought: ‘I keep seeing things outta the corner of my...’

Then he realized: ‘I’m still tripping a little.’

He pondered his memories of the trip: ‘Normally, I’d have at least some experience of “ego dissolution” when Shrooming.’ That puzzled him, and alarmed him somewhat: ‘Seeing things, particularly my own thought processes, without the veils of the ego...that’s a large part of the point of using this sporoid.’

He got out his little stove and heated water for tea. The distortions of his peripheral vision that seemed to almost be meaningful bothered him some, but he could ignore them..

‘But I’d best not head home until I’m all the way straight,’ he thought.

He packed everything up, strapping up his rucksack and setting the rolled tent and sleeping bag beside it.

He climbed slowly and carefully down the ladder to the mucky ground below: ‘Right. I camped at Nail and Claw, across the ‘street’ from Sparrow’s booth.’

He looked around, merely observing the things he could see. He touched his MPS and called up a virtual image of the Country Fair site in that Timeline. He pondered: ‘...Alcatraz semi-Quiet...a Skolo for promising recruits from various Timelines who want to join the Commonwealth military...and now a Diplomatic Deme outpost, too, all at the old prison at Alcatraz, hence the Line’s name...colonies of refugees and POWs in various places around the planet...’

He spoke aloud for the first time since he’d wakened: “I need to go for a hike, to walk this last bit of illusion off.”

He searched out his walking stick, which he’d left at the foot of the ladder: ‘I’ll want this, I expect.” The staff or walking stick had started life as a sucker that he’d trimmed off of a plum tree in the still-overgrown yard at Rose House. He’d planed its sides flat, added leather wrapping to the handle and a leather wrist guard, plus a rubber tip that gripped well on most surfaces. He grinned: “It only resembles a nodachi when I flip it over and use it like one.”

He began to walk, recalling from his look at the site where the driest areas were. As he walked, he recalled the first part of his trip: ‘There were a lot of weird sights and sounds and colors...I can remember that part pretty well, which is good. Matches my previous experience of the shroom, in its opening act.’

He stopped short: “Then...I saw a vision, an hallucination, of Eleni. The Eleni, I mean, Eleni Leontari, the Medusa. She told me something...advice of some sort...”

He shook his head: “That’ll come back to me...”

He began to hike again, waving his hands at the hallucinations at the edges of his sight, as if he were shooing away insects.

He didn’t stop that time, but he remembered: ‘I had to fight an Ant, a pony-sized ant...I won. Sorta.’

‘And there was Gwaros. I don’t recall what we talked about at all.’

“There was more, I’m sure of it. I can’t quite recall...something about the SCA...” He remembered bits and pieces of some kind of ‘Therapy’ session with an ancient crone who lived in a little hut in a forest.

“Huh,” he said aloud. “That will come back to me, probably in dreams...some of the other things, too.” The wrongness of such coherent hallucinations while on that specific drug nagged at the back of his mind, but the front of his mind dismissed it.

He frowned as he looked around. He’d reached a part of the Fair Site that he’d never been in, in any Line. He saw sheds and buildings, and incredibly tall trees...

“No, not possible,” he said, aloud: “Trees that tall would be visible halfway across the county. Either I Shifted or I’m...”

‘Still hallucinating, more than I thought,’ he mused. The trees seemed to call to him. He approached them.

He looked into the aisle between the nearest trees. He narrowed his eyes, suddenly wary.

The trees still called to him, in voices nearly silent to his conscious mind. He laughed at the thought: “How conscious am I, really?”

Still, the summons tugged at him.

He shook his head: “This is sorta why I took the trip in the first place, right?’

Part of his mind yelled: ‘No! This is way too specific to be a shroom trip! Wrong kind of hallucinations! This whole trip is a fuck-up of some kind!’

He ignored that, being in the grip of his curiosity, deluded by the gentle call of the trees.

He climbed over the intertwined roots of two trees and strained his eyes, staring into the near darkness ahead of him.

The trees muttered and swayed, as if in a wind that he couldn’t perceive. He pressed on, wishing for light, in several senses.

One tree stood out, in the distance: ‘I’ve seen that tree before,’ he thought. Then he recognized it, the great fir tree beneath which the Kallikantzari’s hut sat.

He struggled forward over fallen trees, roots the thickness of his torso. Broken branches poked at him from left and right, and drifts of leaves, deep enough to bury him entirely, impeded his progress. His staff helped him greatly.

At last he stood before the tree of the Kallikantzari, huffing and sweating from his exertions, and gazed in wonder at the scene.

Where the wise woman’s hut had stood in his earlier dream, there was a Door.

‘A capital “D” Door,’ he thought. He continued, aloud: “...and it’s a Gate, too. A very peculiar gate, at that...” It glowed in the usual blacklight, hard to look directly at, and sat within a wooden frame, identical to the doorframe of the hut.

He walked around it; as he suspected, from the rear it simply didn’t exist. Experimentally, he walked through the space where he knew it appeared to be, feeling only a peculiar tingle as he went. When he turned, the Gate remained, now pulsing slightly.

“I never noticed that effect before,” he muttered. “Of course I never walked through the back of a Gate...of where a Gate seemed to be...”

He gave up on description, and decided to test another hypothesis. He glanced around and found a stout fallen branch, all lesser branches long since broken from its shaft. He set his staff down and hefted the pole; he reached with it to touch the surface of the Gate. “If it’s a real Gate, the pole will go though, and come back affected by whatever is on the other side...”

He froze, save for the shriek that the contact drew from him. The stick—and his arm—emanated pulsing black electricity, like the Gate that it touched.

The sensation, which in later years he always struggled to describe, lit every fiber of his being afire, and he felt, individually, consciously, every muscle, vessel, and nerve in his body glowing as if from within. His clothes vanished from his sight and he felt himself naked and exposed to the Void.

And more: his mind encompassed the entire network of the Gates, and the worlds and Timelines connected by them. All of it except where the braided strands of one limb penetrated the Squid’s Wall across the Multiverse. He could see the Multiverse, and...it could see him. He shook all over: “How can the Multiverse see me? It can’t be sentient!”

In his mind he “saw” colors that his eyes could never have seen: not one or a dozen, but hundreds, and sensed thousands more that his brain could not process. So much more was going on in the Multiverse than he could comprehend. Each Gate led to a world and each of those worlds was set in a separate infinite Universe: infinity of infinities.

His ego, his “self” was overwhelmed; he simply checked out. He embodied the experience, and it was all he was.

Vomit rose in his throat, his bowels let loose, he pissed and ejaculated at once, his eyes bugged until they felt like they’d soon explode, and his heart actually stopped. For one long moment—how long? He could not tell—his whole being froze and boiled. He looked, unwilling, directly at the many-dimensional Multiverse, and for that moment, comprehended it. In that moment, the dissolution of his ego reached its zenith. He was no one. He was everything.

With the totality of the Multiverse in front of him—behind him, around him, above and below and within him—he could see Time as a physical presence, and sense its non-directionality. The past and the future were neither, not real; all of the Multiverse just sat there, creating itself, Timeline by Timeline and all of them together. There was no Alpha, no Omega: only Being, and beyond it, nothing.

He fell to the ground, without even the possible blessing of a faint. The stick in his hand fell to dust. At some deep level he knew that its use as a conduit for such a vision had been too much for its material being to sustain.

“Feel like I’m about...to follow...its example,” he groaned. Then he really did vomit. He got out of his trousers just in time to let go of another avalanche of loose stool, black with blood. He pissed out a reddish stream of urine, knowing by that how much his innards had been damaged.

“But it’s my brain...no, my mind...” He stared at the Gate, which no longer pulsed. He fell to the ground again, unable to find his balance.

The gnarled roots of the enormous trees twisted into knots; they split and split again, much as the Timelines did. They loomed over him where he sprawled. The branches entangled each other at their tops, much the same as the roots. The sensation washed over him once more; his ego evaporated again, and he was only a tiny piece of an immense reality. Time and Space revealed themselves once more, shattering all of his illusions, again. The constructs that made up “life as we know it” stood revealed as foolishness.

His mind seemed to open up, showing him depths of memory he barely understood. Like paging through a thesaurus his mind groped for a way to codify his experience in words: ‘Immense? Gigantic? Enormous?’ No word in any language he knew tamed the wildness, the nonlinear borders of true reality.

He could feel the invisible tentacles of that reality reaching out of the Gate, enveloping him.

Some time passed, he didn’t know how much. Time itself was an integral part of the torture, pressing down upon him, as if he lay upon the bed of the deep sea, adding another dimension of immensity to the weight that held his ego in check. There was no beginning, he saw: and no end to the variations, no border betweenis and isn’t. No border between self and not self.

‘I’ve always been strong-willed,’ he mused, briefly lucid. He felt how meaningless his will could be. He lost his way again, wishing he were better at simply being.

He stared abstractedly, his mind again blank, his eyes held by the spectacle. The surface of the root in front of him turned a translucent violet, revealing the very warp and weft of its being. He felt the veins and arteries of his brain pulsing, and the tree pulsed with them. He perceived the way his own brain worked, 'saw' how the neurons activated; he felt the axons quiver and heard the messages that passed along them, individually and all at once. He felt no emotion; his consciousness remained diffuse, his self still dispersed and quiet.

It seemed to him that he could see (and hear and smell and touch) the places where he still had pre-conditioned mental habits, where he might make a wrong choice because of the lies that had pervaded his upbringing. He tried to try to remember those, but his will had dissolved with his ego. He groaned as the knowledge slipped through his fingers once again.

The earth beneath him, the dead leaves, and the living leaves on the trees and the needles of the evergreens, all spoke to each other, and he heard them. The sun and the earth and the stars sat each in its own place in a many-dimensional space-time-something and he sat with them, each of them, all of them. He felt simultaneously like a mote of dust and an equal partner with every living thing, including things he’d never thought of as alive, in a beyond-infinite web of life and death.

He moaned and rolled over, staring at the leaves above and the sky beyond them.

His ego re-assembled itself, slowly. ‘Too soon,’ he thought: ‘No human mind could hold this for long...concentrate on the sensation, not the information? Now I see what Sartre was talking about...did he actually see this...?’

He closed his eyes. Existence and the essence it produced faded from him. He yearned for it, reached as if to grasp it and pull it back. Sleep took him, or more than sleep.

He came to himself slowly, as though putting on a long outgrown suit. He looked around: ‘Back in the sleeping space at “Nail and Claw’. I wonder if I really went on that walk or if it was just more tripping?”

He sat in his “quarter lotus” position, as he’d been earlier. His staff lay across his lap.

He nodded to himself: ‘At least I went down the ladder and retrieved the stick.’

He stretched and his trousers squelched.

“Yuck,” he said aloud: “So at least part of that experience was real...”

He stripped out of his clothes. His sweater had bits of puke splattered on the front and leaves and muck from the ground stuck to the back. His pants were a disaster. He got out of his boots and pulled the trousers off, turning them inside out as he did.

He hung them from the branch of a tree behind the booth.

He clambered naked down the ladder, seeking water deep enough for a partial bath. Even after he rinsed himself thoroughly, it took most of a tube of alcohol wipes to get him feeling clean again. He dressed in spare clothes and restrapped the pack.

“Remember to put another outfit into that pack,” he said to himself. He settled back into quarter lotus, concentrating on what little he could recall of the second half of his trip.

He relaxed his shoulders and pulled his gut in, drawing his navel towards his spine. He meditated on his experiences, letting all of the images and feelings wash over him. He sought for the knowledge that his mind had seemed to hold, only moments ago by his reckoning. He found only dribs and drabs of sensation, and the certainty that he had held the full truth of the Multiverse, and of his own existence, in his mind: ‘...for a hundredth of a tenth of a nanosecond, maybe.’

He breathed extra deeply, paying attention and expanding his short ribs: ‘sideways breathing’ some folks called it. Gradually his mind cleared and he became calm and relaxed: ‘As much as I ever do, these days. And today I get a bonus.”

He dragged his rucksack across the floor to where he sat and opened it. He pulled his Adjustable-range Plasma Sword out of the bottom. He stared at it.

He touched the base and it ‘recognized’ him. It turned itself on, humming almost imperceptibly. He slid the controls to their usual spots: half power, four ells of blade. He gazed sidelong at the flat of it: the black, irritating light, which illuminated little or nothing in full daylight.

“That’s the same color as the Gates when they’re active and idle,” he said. He wondered at that: “That makes a kind of sense: the APS is a direct result of Commonwealth research into the alien technology of the Gates. And it’s the color of the...the ‘wiring’ in the alien parts of a Shifter.

“It’s also the color of the—I guess I’d call it the background—of the Multiverse, as it was just revealed to me. As I perceived it...absolute color, what is that anyway? And that also makes perfect sense: that the wiring, and the Gates, and the APS all operate on principles that are only revealed in the structure of the Multiverse itself. But...

“It’s also the color of the sky in the Squids’ home Timeline. If it’s a Timeline...And that is very likely not a coincidence.” He nodded slowly, thinking hard. He shut down the APS and put the hilt into his pocket.

“I’m not sure what it says about the Squids that they apparently live very close to the base, the source, of all reality. That has to have had an effect...on them...”

He rose and gathered his belongings. He climbed down the ladder, thinking of home.

He turned quickly, and saw no illusions. He nodded: “Time to go.”

He began to re-trace his steps, heading for his usual Jump point near Daredevil Palace. He thought of sleep, real restorative sleep, unmediated by any hallucinogen. He yawned.

Ambros leaned back in his office chair and spoke, seemingly to no one: “Get me a news update, chronological, back to my last log-in.”

The desktop computer spoke in a monotone: “Dhulyéna.”

That, he knew, meant “working”: ‘That desktop is an elderly G5, with a bunch of Commonwealth upgrades. By either Line’s standards it can be kinda slow...’

The screen lit up with a simulacrum of a newspaper. The banner read: The Los Angeles Times. The machine highlighted a front page article, below the fold.

Ambros read the headline aloud: “San Diego Warehouse Robbery-Murders Still Unsolved; Police Baffled.” The subhead said: ‘Whoever they were, they covered their tracks well, says police spox.’

He dug up the original files of evidence that his old affinity group had assembled on the CIA-Guatemalan-American Mob-San Diego Police Department drug and slave operations. He compared them point-by-point with the statements in the article.

‘We covered our tracks well,’ Ambros mused, amused: ‘and the San Diego PD undoubtedly hit one dead end after another in their attempted investigation. They can hardly admit that members of their own department were killed at the scene of a crime, certainly not that they were complicit in it. Especially those crimes: drug running, kidnapping, and human trafficking.’

He made a gesture with his left hand and the machine moved to the next item: video of a press conference at a prison outside Guatemala City. A distressed-looking functionary in a typically silly-looking quasi-military uniform stood at a podium in front of a badly damaged prison wall, trying to explain how so much damage could have been done by the small number of intruders that his security cameras had caught. Every second question was about several high-value prisoners who had escaped in the chaos, most especially Jaime de Cordova.

“Jaime is in hospital in the Commonwealth,” Ambros commented; the machine replied: “Akuo sas.”

Ambros gestured as if snapping his fingers, but silently. The machine moved on. More mysteries: disappearing bureaucrats, bizarre difficulties with government computer programs, police interactions with the local Eugene anarchists and the homeless, news from the international rare coin markets, more revelations about the activities of Posse Comitatus in Eugene.

He stopped the machine and read the whole article, then watched the video interview that Chief Black of the EPD gave to a local TV station. He pursed his lips and considered possible complications arising from his summary execution of the whole local Posse, and what the national organization might do or try to do to him: “The only way I’ll come to their attention is if Brad Dillon or his henchmen had already reported that they were on my tail...but that could have happened, indeed it could have.” He pondered that: ‘I may have to fight them—Posse Comitatus, that is—again.’

He wondered how he’d feel about that: ‘I felt myself, for a moment, connected to every living thing in a living Multiverse. How do I square that with killing people...even when one of them is pointing a firearm at me?’

He set that aside: ‘Philosophy is fine and all...And all life is precious, but everything dies. I’d rather not die myself, any sooner than I must, so...Posse C had best not test me.’

Another gesture, and the machine proceeded: A long article in Rolling Stone about the man he’d known as “Hector Miller” which included oblique references to things Ambros had himself done or engineered, leading to “Miller’s” outing and subsequent downfall. He pondered that:

“The way I did that...I seem to have a memory of a warning or something...but from whom? I can’t recall. Think about it later.”

Next came a TV news story about fallout from a ‘drug raid gone bad’ at the Oregon Country Fair site in Veneta.

He signaled for more information about that one and the machine rolled a video: his “handshake mode” friend Deputy Dan Samuelson stood in front of the wrecked police helicopter at Mainstage Meadow, reading from a prepared statement.

After a moment Ambros thought: ‘No content there. Dan was just slinging BS and catching flak. I’ll ask him about what’s really going on later.’

The next several news stories involved unrest in a number of places around the world: ‘...the Ukraine, Hungary, couple African countries, India...Japan? Machine, translate those signs and banners.”

The messages on the protestor’s signs made him say: “Hmmm. That’s slightly hopeful...”

He felt overwhelmingly sleepy. He said aloud: “That’s a normal aftereffect of that shroom stuff I was tripping on, and besides...” He yawned gapingly, and shook his head: “Just go to bed. Hope for dreams that illuminate your situation...”

Ambros woke suddenly and sat up. He could hear a sound like distant hammering: “Crap, that’s someone rapping on the office door.”

He leaped out of bed and touched his MPS—the device he called a Multiversal Positioning System, though it did a lot more than that. One of the other things it did was to automatically tell him date and time in several Timelines.

It spoke in a monotone, buzzing in his ears only: “United States Imperial Timeline Seventeen. Thursday January 5th, 2008, ten oh eight AM.”

He touched the hologram Shifter on his wrist silent before it could start in on the Commonwealth calendar, or the one from the newly contacted President Paine Line.

He shook his head, trying to clear his mind, which seemed remarkably fuzzy: “Oh yeah, Randy’s lesson. Better get moving.”

He snagged a set of fighting clothes off the chair by his bed and walked towards the office. Through the bedroom door, which opened at his touch, and across the office to the door into the main hall of his Salon.

“Just a sec, Randy, hang on!” He slipped his Commonwealth-made ‘cup’ into place, and it clung to his skin, molding itself to his anatomy.

He got the pants on backwards, cursed himself for a scatter-brained idiot, got them on correctly, and tied the drawstrings. He opened the door: “C’mon in, sorry I’m late, it’s been one of those weeks.”

Randy entered the office; Ambros gestured and he sat down.

“You look pretty befuddled, sir. Maybe we should postpone again.”

Ambros shook his head: “You gotta be ready for the third week in January, family vacation, remember? You’ll be running the Salon for two lessons and a history class.”

“Yeah, you’re right. I really need to work on teaching the footwork...”

Ambros filled the kettle and set it on the hot plate to boil. He made a pot of tea and found a couple boiled eggs in the mini-fridge.

He ate hungrily and poured tea for Randy and himself; he sighed deeply.

After a decent interval, Randy asked: “How have you been? I haven’t seen you since early New Year’s Day.”

“Things have been complicated. I got called away, I had to leave suddenly, y’know?”

“Suddenly.” Randy spoke sarcastically.

“I told you, some of my tech is a little bit outlandish...”

“Outlandish? Sir, you just vanished. That’s more than just ‘a little bit outlandish’. That’s...pretty much impossible. But I saw you do it, and I heard a bang afterwards...”

“That was air falling into the space I’d vacated. Similar to a sonic boom.”

“Yeah, I figured that out,” said Randy, rising and pacing across office and back: “And that’s what made me believe it, because that’s not something I’d ever thought of, you know?”

“Yes, I do.”

“You gonna explain this shit, now?”

“Depends. How much do you want to know? It’s dangerous to know this stuff. I warned you...”

“You did. I guess...I want to know enough to settle my mind. How did you do that? Where did you go to?”

“That’s reasonable...Let me pause a moment and consider. Let’s armor up, in the meantime.”

“Okay...”

Ambros armored unusually slowly, meditating on each piece: ‘...this is the light gear, for shinai or reedswords. Greaves...sabots...cuisses and knees...’ eventually donning his helm: ‘Nothing’s missing, nothing’s damaged.’

Randy had noted his careful movements and moved at a similar pace. At length they were both ready.

They faced off in the center of the room. Ambros saluted. As Randy returned the salute, Ambros slowly slumped into as relaxed a version of ‘Boar’s tooth’ as he could, emptying his mind of all cares and opening his Commonwealth-augmented senses to all the sights and sounds and smells that filled the room.

Randy saw that. His eyes narrowed a bit.

Ambros said: “Show me what you’ve got, Skolaros.”

Randy moved slowly into a guard: Posta de Donna, from Fiore. He rotated his stance a little to the left, and attacked suddenly, slicing downleft with his shinai.

Ambros wasn’t there. He’d stepped back circularly, a la Silver, and made an easy open cut to both of Randy’s arms.

“Good!” Randy stepped back and attacked again.

Ambros set Randy’s blade aside and spun his sword in a teardrop, briefly adopting “Posta falcone” on his way through, and struck Randy again, easily.

For the next half hour, Ambros rarely let their shinai cross. Maneuvering by footwork and upper body movement, he avoided Randy’s attacks and countered with light blows, mostly aimed at joints and upper body. On the rare occasions when Randy forced him to actually block or parry, he cried out: “Excellent!”

Ambros could see everything Randy tried to do, well before the attacks could be initiated: ‘This is how Arrenji feels when she’s in this state; it’s interesting.’

That momentary lapse in his concentration allowed Randy to land a blow to his head: “Good!” he said, falling back into the strange state: “Three more?”

Randy nodded, eager to follow up on his brief success.

For the next two engagements, Ambros went so far as to smother Randy’s attacks before he could even twitch. Then in the final bout, he stopped all of that and fought a “fair match,” blocking and parrying, attacking when good opportunities arose, but not so quickly that Randy had no chance to defend.

That fight lasted a full two minutes; Ambros ended it then, with a slash across Randy’s grill.

Ambros switched his sword to his left hand, and stepped back. He saluted.

Randy returned the salute and slumped, by his body language fairly depressed.

“Helms off, let’s sit,” said Ambros.

When they were sitting tailor style, knee to knee, Ambros said: “Tough to face that, huh?”

Randy had tears in his eyes: “I thought...”

After a moment, Ambros finished the sentence: “You thought you were getting pretty good at this swordplay stuff. Right?”

Randy nodded.

“You are getting pretty good, Randy. You really are.”

“Didn’t show it today, did I?”

“Actually, you did very well. Stay where you are...” Ambros rose in place and began to pace about: “How long have you been at this? A little less than a year? And self-taught for half of that?”

Randy nodded.

“I started practicing sword and shield when I was twenty-one. In the thirty-three years since then, there has rarely been a day when I didn’t at least think about the Art, and never a week went by when I didn’t at least do some drills or ‘air sword’ or mix it up with some training partners.”

Randy nodded: “I get it...”

Ambros interrupted him: “No, I don’t think you really do. See, on top of all of that, I recently fell in with some teachers who are as much better than I am as I’m better than you. One of them—Arrenji—recently schooled me much the way I just did you. And I used a sort of simulacrum of her style just now, to nearly completely dominate you.”

“...okay,” said Randy. He looked up: “I can see there’s a lot more to learn than I realized.”

“Yep.”

“You say you ’fell in with them’...these new teachers of yours.”

“Yeah,” Ambros said, looking at Randy with a calculating eye: “Last July, at the Country Fair, I made a somewhat alarming discovery.” Ambros sat down again.

“What was that?”

Ambros drew a deep breath: “Everything I thought I knew about the structure of reality, the Universe, and everything...was wrong, mistaken...untrue.” He kept his eyes on Randy.

The young man looked up: “What is the truth then?”

“Our world, our universe, is but one of many. Millions, maybe billions. Perhaps infinite, know one knows...no human knows, I should say.”

“No human knows...” Randy mused: “You want to elaborate on that?”

“Mmm. Maybe not just yet.”

“Okay,” Randy said: “So when you vanished out this room, dressed in a suit of weird-ass high tech armor that still managed to look like a soldier’s kit from ancient Greece, you went to another universe?”

“Timeline. We call them Timelines.” Ambros sighed: “I left here and Saltated—That means ‘jumped’ in Greek, so sometimes people say ‘Jumped’ in American—I Saltated to a Timeline called ‘Commonwealth Prime’ or the Hellenic Commonwealth and Polity. Is this Too Much Information?”

“Yeah, getting there. I get what you’re saying. But...”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, let’s do it this way.” Ambros got up and went into his bedroom, seeking the pants he’d been wearing the night before. He found what he wanted and went back out to where Randy sat.

“On your feet, Skolaros. Stand close.”

“What are we doing?”

“This is a Shifter, I’m gonna take you on a little trip. I’ll let you see some things, touch a few things, walk about a bit, so you know it’s real. Then back here, and we’ll work on footwork drills for the other students.”

“Okay...”

A half hour later they stood by the armor rack, doffing their kits, cleaning and racking the components.

Randy said: “That was Seattle, huh?”

Ambros grunted a yes: “You saw the Space Needle, didn’t you?”

“Weird.”

“That Timeline is called Alcatraz Quiet. You don’t need to worry about why, yet.”

“Good. Foot work.”

“Right. Allie has a tendency to separate her feet and knees. She goes pigeon-toed while her knees are pointed in. She’s getting away with that because she’s only ten, and very flexible, but we need to break that habit before she gets to puberty. Feet and knees must work together, we talked about why...so I’ll want you to drill her in this taichi thing where you rotate your leg from the hip down on your heel. Like this.”

“Got it.”

“Robert hops and bounces around too much. You will need to continue working with him on the ‘circular stepping’ and ‘still head’ drills...”

“Got that...”

“A lot of the Western sword manuals show people fighting on the balls of their feet. Keep emphasizing that, everyone should stay up there, little or no weight on the heels: it will make a lot of the forms easier to do...”

“Yes, sir.”

The lesson went on.

Later that day, Ambros sat down in the chair that Arrenji indicated. He asked: “What’s up?”

“Contact with that new Timeline. What did you call it? The President Tom Paine Line?”

“Yeah.” Ambros wore relatively non-descript clothing: dark grey trousers and a crocheted sweater. He’d Jumped into Commonwealth Prime at Arrenji’s summons, so he wore no tokens of his rank.

“They just activated the holo-receiver.” Averos sat down beside Ambros.

“The guy we’ll see here is that Mr Barrie, The ‘Secretary of Espionage’,” said Arrenji: “The woman is their President.”

Ambros nodded: “Ursula Grover.”

The tank sitting in front of them cleared and the people they expected appeared in it.

Jay Hussein Barrie sat beside the President; he said: “Madam President, may I present to you Magistri Arrenji Athenini of the Sacred Band, which is a Special Forces group; Magistros Averos, Technical Guild Liason to Prime Commonwealth Timeline’s War Guilds, and…I do not recall the other gentleman’s name...”

Arrenji gestured: “This is Spathos Ambros; he is here to help us, since he comes originally from a Timeline related to yours.” She grinned in amusement: “Not closely related, but then none are.”

Barrie gestured: “Ursula Grover, the President of the United States.”

Grover spoke: “Very pleased to meet you all.”

A short silence ensued. Ambros said: “We’ve downloaded your History from your Library of Congress and from the Smithsonian, in your Line.”

Arrenji said: “We’ve also been monitoring your news media.”

A moment passed, and then Jay Barrie said: “And then you asked for a meeting, in this format. Now you have it.”

Averos said: “Ambros thinks we should offer you some help.”

“He approves of your version of the United States of America.” That from Arrenji, who spoke softly.

“How kind,” said the President: “So there is more than one version?”

Arrenji and Averos looked at Ambros, who spoke slowly: “Timelines come in batches; we call them families. Usually, a new Line will fragment several times in the process of its formation. Your Line and mine split at the time of the 1804 Presidential election. In your Line, Thomas Paine became the fourth President, and Mr. Jefferson retired to Monticello.”

“Well, yes,” Ursula said: “I take it that didn’t happen in your version of history...”

“Paine didn’t even run.” Ambros snarled: “Our abolitionists were such a timid bunch at that point...”

He explained, in rough outline, the History of his own Line. Ursula sat there, shaking her head in amazed horror.

“...at the end of that second Great War, the US Line fragmented again, severely, and continued to do so for almost half a century. The US Imperial Lines are fairly stable, now.”

Arrenji said: “Your Line is also stable. We think there are a couple ‘descendant’ Lines that split off of yours in the period 1871 to 1900, but we haven’t contacted those yet.”

“Anyway,” Ambros continued: “You have a way more civilized version of the US project then any other Line that I know of. I’d personally hate to see things go wrong for you. And the invasion you’re facing looks really dangerous to me. To us.”

Jay said: “I’d have to agree.”

Averos spoke: “Ambros, here, has some people who have offered to help him, in any way he needs help. They are what you might call badass people, and they know how to fight.”

“Black Warrior Guild,” said Ambros: “They’re not as scary as Sacred Band, but they are pretty scary, and there are a lot more of them.”

Arrenji said: “Ambros is a busy man, but he is going to be watching your Timeline, and he has the Sacred Band Master’s Council’s leave to intervene. And very well-trained troops at his disposal, thanks to a favor he did for one of their own.” She looked at Jay, narrowing her eyes: “We’re going to ignore your problems with Quebec, because it would be impossible to intervene there without it becoming public knowledge.”

Ambros said: “Similarly with the Empire of Brazil. But if it looks like the Russians and the Han are making a go of it as they cross Alaska, we’ll step in.”

“All right,” Jay said: “I have an operative in the wildernessthere.If you’re going in, message me, and I’ll put you in touch.”

Ambros checked his MPS: “We done here?”

Arrenji waved her hand in a sign and the holo-tank cleared. A moment later the transmitter dropped in, steaming a little, probably from its passage through a very humid Quiet Line.

Ambros took his leave.