Chaos Mode

CHAPTER 1—CONTACT

IT was the strangest creature Darius had seen. “Uh-oh,” he heard Colene say.

The four of them stood by the anchor, gazing out onto the world it showed, and the thing that hovered in the foreground. The world was ordinary: a gently rolling countryside, patches of flowering bushes, and trees beyond. In the distance were blue-gray mountains. He had seen many realities like this. But the creature was something else.

It was about the size of a calf, maybe the weight of two solid men, and roughly oval in cross section. At the top was what looked like a stout elephant’s trunk, but it connected to no elephant’s head. Instead it seemed to thicken, and then condense into another trunk pointing the other way. Two or three projections sprouted from its center, moving sinuously, as if snakes were poking their heads out of small tunnels. The double trunk might as well have been the snout of a dragon, ready to belch fire fore and aft.

The main body was odder yet. It was covered with stubby projections and with holes. Air was being sucked into those holes and evidently blown out below, because—

Because the thing was floating just above the ground. He stared, but saw no sign of legs or feet. Yet it did not seem to be magically levitating. Instead the body was hovering on a cushion of air. Its base seemed to be a curtain to enclose that air, and sections rippled as gusts moved out.

Its mind is blank to me.

Darius became aware of his companions. Beside him on the right stood Seqiro, the massive horse. He was their most intimate companion, because of his powerful telepathy. With him, all of them seemed to speak the same language, and could share feelings directly if they wished to. It was Seqiro who had spoken—or rather, who had projected his thought.

“It is an alien creature,” Darius said. “It will take time to fathom its mind.”

He spoke in his own language, but knew that the others heard it as their own, because of the linkage. Colene had set out across the Virtual Mode to join him, and he had set out similarly to join her. They had met more or less in the center, where they had encountered complications. But she had met the horse first, and that had turned out to be a wonderfully unifying thing, because of the ambience of their shared thoughts. Now, with fair luck, they would resume their trek across the Modes and reach Darius’ reality. There they could settle down to a satisfying existence. If they didn’t get stuck along the way. If they could work out their personal problems. If a thousand likely things did not happen.

“It’s our new anchor person,” Colene said. “It has to be, because here we are facing a new reality, and there it is facing us. So we’d better talk to it fast, before it decides we’re its next meal.” She nudged Darius. “Can you do your thing with it?”

“Transfer?” he asked. He had the ability, in his own reality and in some others, to drain the emotion from a person, and then to broadcast it to everyone in the vicinity. That was his job, at home, as the Cyng of Hlahtar. Or, as Colene put it in her idiomatic thought, King of Laughter. He made people happy. But he hadn’t been able to do it in Julia, the Mode they had just left. Each reality seemed to have its own mysterious rules of magic, science, or whatever. “I can try. But who—?”

“Not with me!” Colene protested. “I’m full of depression. That thing’s depressing enough, without adding to it.”

That was of course her tragedy. Instead of being a vessel of joy, she was a vessel of dolor. Except when she was close to him; then her love blotted out the pain. Their shared thoughts revealed it all. It was one of those problems they had to work out.

“But Nona is the only other human person here,” he said.

Colene thought of the way he drew emotion, and he followed her thoughts to their inevitable conclusion. He had to get as close as possible to the other person, and that other person was Nona. That was disaster, as Colene saw it. “Skip that for now,” Colene decided. She faced Nona, the fourth member of their party. “What about you? Can you work your magic here?”

Nona considered. She was verging on eighteen years old, and absolutely beautiful in face, feature, and mind. Her thick cloud of brown/black hair framed her head and shoulders and full bosom in a manner that was endlessly becoming. Darius knew that Colene feared she would never be able to match that sort of appeal. All this and magic too!

Nona gestured. Nothing happened. She concentrated, her face as lovely when frowning as when smiling. “My magic has no effect,” she reported. “I can not levitate, or move objects, or transform them to other forms or substances. I am not in a position to attempt healing, and I am not yet sufficiently adept at changing my own shape to know whether I can do that here. There does not seem to be sufficient magic power here for me to draw on.”

“How about illusion?” Colene asked.

“Oh, that’s not magic,” Nona protested innocently. “Anyone can do that.”

“Anyone in your Julia set,” Colene said wryly. “The rest of us can’t.”

Nona concentrated again. A faint haze appeared above the horse. That was all.

“What about a familiar?” Darius asked. “That’s not physical magic.”

“But for that I must touch an animal.” Colene looked at the monster floating patiently before them. “Is that an animal?”

“I couldn’t touch that!” Nona exclaimed, horrified. “Well, we have a choice, here,” Colene said, exhibiting some of the qualities that made her a much more significant person in her own right than she believed: intelligence, initiative, and courage. She was only fourteen, but much like a full woman in some respects. “This has to be our new anchor person, and it has to have had a really good reason to latch on to our Virtual Mode. So chances are it’s either a scientist or a felon. We can’t shut it out from our Mode. So either we try to ignore it, or we try to come to terms with it. Me, I’d rather know something about it before I relax.” She nerved herself. “So I’ll go touch it. If it eats me, the rest of you get away from here in a hurry.”

Nona smiled ruefully. “I will touch it, Colene. Perhaps I can indeed tame it as a familiar.” She stepped forward. Colene thought to protest, but Seqiro’s thought restrained her. I will work with her, as I have before. Perhaps together we can relate to it.

Nona’s magic and the horse’s powerful telepathy. They could indeed work well together. Seqiro could help Nona without getting in range of the weird creature. “Thanks, horseface,” she said, reverting to one of her immature facets. The irony was that she appealed to him this way, too. He loved her as she was, with her internal conflicts and all.

Nona approached the creature somewhat diffidently. Seqiro suppressed her natural fear, so that she could be objective. Seqiro could if necessary take over a person’s body, if the person let him, and make him or her do things impossible to manage alone. Probably he could enable Nona to leap away from the creature with inhuman speed and strength. If she needed to. So this was not quite as risky a procedure as it might seem.

The creature quivered on its cushion of air. Two of the upper stalks twisted to orient on her.

“Eyes!” Colene exclaimed. “It’s a BEM!”

“A what?” Darius asked.

“A bug-eyed monster. It’s focusing its eyes on Nona.”

“Those look more like snail eyes to me,” Darius said. But he had to agree that they were orbs of some sort.

As Nona came close to the thing, they saw that knobs poked out from its rim, each on a rod, like the antennae of sea denizens. But these didn’t look quite like antennae. They looked like blind terminals, in Colene’s imagery. Darius lacked sufficient experience to understand the nature of the reference, but he accepted it because he had no better image of his own. He had had some limited experience with machines, while crossing the realities of the Virtual Mode, and gathered that this was a machine analogy.

Nona stopped beside the creature. Air from the thing’s outflow stirred the turf by her feet. The stalked knobs reached out farther, wiggling.

Now Darius saw something else. The thing did have eyes. They were on the three central stalks. They were watching Nona. So it knew she was there. What else did it know?

Nona slowly reached out. Her left hand came toward one of the knobs.

Suddenly that knob jumped outward on its rod and smacked into her hand. Nona, still pacified by the horse, did not jerk away. She remained calm, her hand holding the knob.

Something happened. The ambience of telepathy faded. It was like stepping out of a warm chamber into the chill air of a barren plain.

Darius looked at Colene. She seemed as concerned as he was. She put her hands to her head, as if something was missing from it. Then they both looked at Seqiro.

Now the horse was just a horse. Darius noticed how Seqiro, eighteen hands high at the shoulder, dwarfed the girl, who was only fifteen hands high at the top of her head. But the horse’s brown mane exactly matched Colene’s brown hair. They were a matched set in that respect, and in age: Seqiro was also fourteen. The girl loved horses, and Seqiro loved girls. Seqiro linked them all, telepathically, and liked them all; he assumed the qualities of whatever mind he was in touch with, borrowing its intelligence. But Colene was his first love. If there were to come a crisis, and Seqiro had to choose just one of them to save, she would be the one.

Colene spoke. This time he heard it in her actual language, without the translation to his own. Normally the horse relayed the thoughts, and each person’s mind did the rendering, unconsciously; now those thoughts were not there. But Darius had spent time with Colene in her reality, when they first met, and had come to learn some of her language. He could translate it, approximately, when he concentrated.

“Seqiro—are you all right?” she was asking. Or “Are you well?” or “You have not been harmed?”

“He—all—well,” Darius said, picking from his memory of her vocabulary. “He—help—she.” For he was tuning in on the horse, as he might for a drawing of emotion, and realized that there was no problem. Seqiro was merely devoting his entire mental energy to the purpose at hand: Nona’s rapport with the creature. It had to be a considerable challenge.

Colene looked back at Nona, and Darius followed her gaze. The woman stood unmoving, her eyes blank, her hand on the knob. But the creature was moving, slowly: it was settling to the ground. The swish of air diminished, and then faded out, as the bony lower fringe of the creature came to rest on the ground. The three eye stalks retracted until they were mere spots on the surface.

“Xxxx yyyyyy zzzzz,” Colene said, incomprehensibly, amazed. She was using vocabulary too sophisticated for Darius to decipher. Then, realizing, she turned back to him. She concentrated visibly, and he felt a faint touch at his mind. She was trying to use her own very limited telepathy.

So he stepped to her, embraced her, and focused his mind on hers, as if he were about to draw her emotion. But he only touched her awareness, without taking hold of it. That facilitated the contact, and amplified her projection.

Innocent woman and fantasy horse, she thought. Then, realizing that she was getting through, but not sufficiently, she clarified the concepts. Young woman, girl, never done sex—

“Virgin,” he said, grasping the concept. Virgin with one-horned horse, she thought, then spoke the word: “Unicorn.” Only virgin can tame unicorn. Nona—

He nodded. Nona, unlike Colene, was a virgin. This suggested a certain mental innocence. Sometimes only the truly innocent could approach a creature others knew to be dangerous. Somehow the creature might know, and not harm her. As he reflected, he picked up more of the background from Colene’s reflections. It seemed that there was a certain ironic humor to the myth: unicorns were extremely rare. In fact they did not exist at all. The implication was that human virgins were similarly rare. That concept was tinged with grief and anger, for Colene herself had found out how a virgin lost her innocence. It had not been by her choice.

So it was Colene’s judgment that Nona was taming the monster. With the help of all Seqiro’s mental power. All he and Colene could do was not interfere. They would just have to wait for it to happen.

They were, in effect alone. He was holding her close. He brought his head down. She lifted her face. They kissed.

Colene had never been strong on subtlety. She grabbed on to his shoulders, heaved herself up within his embrace, and wrapped her legs around his torso—while holding the kiss. She opened her mouth a little and stuck her tongue through. He was so startled he almost dropped her. She laughed—still without breaking the kiss.

But he was learning her ways. He slid a hand down to her upper thigh and tickled it through the cloth of her trousers. She squirmed, but he continued more vigorously, crossing the buttock, until she had to break the kiss and grab his hand. “No fair!” she cried, trying to act outraged as he let her slide down to the ground. He needed no telepathic translation of that expression. She was still young enough to consider herself duty-bound to react to tickling, especially in places where it wasn’t supposed to be done.

She made as if to punch him in the groin. He made as if to grab her by the hair. They were feinting, looking for a pretext to kiss again. Colene was also, in her fashion, trying to seduce him. Fortunately he was more experienced than she in this respect, and was countering her ploys emotionally as well as physically. He never forgot that though they loved each other, she was too young. By the standard of her culture she was not supposed to be ready for sexual interplay. That standard had been violated, and the violation had caused her much emotional mischief. He intended to see that it wasn’t violated again. Perhaps when they reached his reality, it could be determined whether she could be considered a new citizen, governed by the more permissive standards his people enjoyed. So that she would be allowed to choose for herself. Because he would like nothing better than to let her seduce him, if—

Then Darius heard something. It was a honk. He held up a hand, flat, signaling her to desist.

She had heard it too. She looked in the correct direction. Nothing was visible.

Then they heard a faint hissing or swishing, as of moving air. Something was happening in the distance, out of sight. What could it be?

Colene was the first to catch on. She pointed to the creature with Nona. She pursed her mouth and blew air out. Then she pointed to the unseen noise. Another of that kind of creature?

Darius suspected that it was. Now he heard more hissing, from another direction. Then from a third. There could be several such creatures drawing near.

The creature they had met had invoked the anchor. That could only have been for serious reason. It was possible it was a criminal, trying to flee where the local law could not follow. But it was also possible it was a martyr, deserving of assistance. Regardless, it was the anchor creature, and no one else could release that anchor, so they were stuck with it. Better to get to know it, as Colene had said.

But they wouldn’t get much chance, if others of its kind came and captured it. Others were indeed coming; now he saw one steaming in from the forest, gliding across the land at what must be its traveling speed.

There was a honk from that direction. “First blood,” Colene muttered, and again he didn’t need a translation. The prey had been sighted, and soon all of them would be here. Indeed, another appeared, sliding at the same velocity. Darius judged that he could outrun the things, but he wasn’t sure that they wouldn’t accelerate and outpace him.

Nona and the local creature remained in their communion. What was happening between them? Would it be dangerous to interrupt? But it might be dangerous not to interrupt, and warn them of the approach of others.

Darius took a step toward them. Colene grabbed his arm, shaking her head no. Then she walked to the horse, reached for his head, and changed her mind. She signaled Darius, making an up motion with her two hands.

What did she have in mind? He went to her, put his hands on her hips, and heaved her up so that her head was the height of the horse’s head. She was a small girl, and carried no excess weight; it was easy to lift her.

She put her face to Seqiro’s left ear. “Seqiro,” she murmured. Then, louder: “Seqiro.” Then she put her mind into it: Seqiro.

The ear twitched. She had gotten his attention. “Danger, maybe,” she said.

This time Darius heard her through his mind, with no effort. The horse had resumed the job.

“Others of this kind are approaching rapidly,” Darius said. “We must alert this one, in case this means trouble.”

Nona looked around. She had heard the warning too. She still had her hand on the knob, but the communion seemed to have ended.

“Seqiro,” Nona said. “Amplify me for one more moment; I must warn him and ask him to follow us through the anchor.”

The other creatures were converging. “Do it!” Colene cried.

The ambience faded again. Then Nona withdrew her hand.

The creature infused air. Its eye stalks sprang out and waved, sweeping the horizon. The air hissed louder. The body lifted from the ground.

“Come on!” Nona cried. She ran for the anchor.

The creature followed.

The other creatures were closing in. The closest one crossed a patch of sandy soil. Its rear trunk dragged down, touching the sand. Then sand blasted out of its front trunk. The sand didn’t travel far ahead, but some of the pebbles in it did. One landed not far from Darius.

“They’re shooting at us!” Colene exclaimed, outraged.

“Get moving!” Darius shouted.

They ran after Nona and the creature. Nona abruptly disappeared, having stepped through the anchor. Then the creature did the same.

“Come on, Seqiro!” Colene cried. Because the horse was waiting for her.

The three of them stepped through the anchor almost together. The scenery hardly changed, but the pursuing creatures vanished. Nona and the first creature were not in view.

We are in the next reality, Nona’s thought came. We passed through two.

“She can mind-talk across Modes?” Darius asked, startled.

“No. Seqiro can transmit across Modes, when he tries,” Colene explained. “Especially when he knows the people. He’s keeping track of Nona.”

They walked three more steps, and there were Nona and the creature, seemingly popping into existence. The Virtual Mode was like that: every ten feet, by Colene’s reckoning, there was the boundary of another reality, or Mode, similar to the last but a completely separate entity. The land and vegetation changed less between Modes than the animals did, so animate creatures seemed to pop in and out against the common background. It was, as Colene also put it, weird—until a person became accustomed to it.

“Okay, Nona, what gives?” Colene inquired. “Did you get its life story?” She gazed without complete trust at the creature, and two of the eye stalks gazed back at her. The third was watching Darius, and he was just as disconcerted as Colene was. The thing was obviously aware, and now that he knew that its trunks could hurl stones, he feared what other threats it could muster.

“No,” Nona said. “We reached only the yes/no not-enemies stage. The rest is too complicated to assimilate immediately. This is a completely alien creature, but he means us no harm. He wants to travel on the Virtual Mode.”

“Look,” Colene said. “This landscape is Earth. Not right around where I live, but somewhere on the continent. I know Earth when I see it. How did such freakish aliens get here? Did they conquer Earth and kill all the people? I mean, how do we know this thing isn’t trying to conquer the larger universe, the way Emperor Ddwng of the DoOon Mode was?”

That was a fair question. They had barely escaped that grasping Emperor, and only by tricking him into vacating his anchor. They did not want to get into such a situation again.

“This is indeed your Earth,” Nona agreed. “But he is not alien. He is native. His species evolved here. And he is not an evil creature.”

“How can you know that?” Colene demanded, “I’m insure that nothing like this has ever existed on Earth. I mean, the eye stalks are possible, and maybe the elephant trunks, and maybe the knobs. But air suspension and propulsion? No way!”

Nona shook her head. “My understanding is as yet imperfect. But there is no untruth when I tame a familiar, and there is no untruth here. To him, we are the alien creatures. He was appalled when he saw us; it was all he could do to remain for my contact. I am the ugliest creature he has seen or imagined, let alone touched.”

Darius laughed, and so did Colene. Anyone in the universe who thought Nona was ugly was crazy.

But she was serious. “Seqiro at least could be mistaken for a large animal, but the three of us are like demonic fantasies. It was some time before he could suppress his revulsion enough to pick up my thoughts, and it remains difficult. But this was the gamble he took when he invoked the Virtual Mode, and he has to live with it. He could not remain with his kind. I don’t understand what is wrong, but he is not a bad person; it is some complex social interaction that caused him to be banished. But he can not live alone, so he had to gamble on alien contact.”

“You say his kind is native to Earth, in this reality?” Colene asked. “Then what about our kind?”

“Our kind does not exist here. We never lived here. None of the kinds of animals we are most familiar with ever existed here.”

“You mean no mammals at all?” Colene asked, daunted, “I know this is a different reality, and a lot of them don’t have any life at all, but—”

“No mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, dragons—no vertebrates,” Nona said. “No—what you call chordates. But there are arthropods, and sponges, and mollusks, and the plants seem similar. I think everything is much the same, except that his kind is here and our kind isn’t.”

“How far back does this go?” Colene asked.

“From the time that many-celled life evolved. He thinks of three great dyings that eliminated many creatures, but his kind managed to survive the last two, and come to dominate the world.”

“From the time of multi-celled creatures?” Colene asked. “That’s the Cambrian explosion! Five or six hundred million years ago!”

“Yes, that seems to be the scale time he is thinking of,” Nona agreed. “In my universe, it isn’t the same, so it’s confusing.”

“The Burgess Shale!” Colene exclaimed.

“The what?” Darius asked.

“This is a world where things changed with the Burgess Shale,” Colene said, awed.

Nona looked blank, and Darius felt the same. “Things are obviously different here,” he said. “But what does shale have to do with it?”

“Well, nothing, really, maybe. But it’s where we discovered all the strange creatures who didn’t make it. The experiments of evolution. It must be that in this reality, our phylum, the chordates, didn’t make it, while his phylum, whatever it is, did. So I guess this is Burgess, and this is the world of Shale.”

Darius exchanged a glance with Nona. Even with telepathy, this didn’t seem to make much sense.

“Each Mode has its own rules,” Darius said. “Whether of magic, or science, or memory, or something else. Perhaps they all were unified once, if we could trace back to the points of divergence. This creature is surely no stranger than many others we might encounter in other realities. But surely he has a name of his own, and we should honor that.”

“What’s his name?” Colene asked Nona.

“It’s just an electrical identity pattern. I wouldn’t know how to translate it to a name in our terms.”

“That’s what I thought,” Colene said smugly. “So we have to call him something we can relate to. So it’s Burgess. The same goes for this world/reality. So it’s Shale.” She faced Darius. “You have a problem with that?”

He knew better than to challenge her on a minor point. “I have no problem, if he does not. He can address us by electrical pulses, if he wishes, so long as we are able to tell whom he means.”

“Nah. Seqiro can render the translations. When we say Burgess, he’ll hear his pulse, and when he pulses at us, we’ll hear our names.”

Nona looked doubtful. “Seqiro has not yet related to—to Burgess. He has merely amplified my power of relating to a familiar, and I have somewhat clumsily communicated. We shall have to spend a great deal more time together before we can converse at all readily. It is—it is like learning another language. For him and for me. We have been exchanging pictures.”

“Well, then maybe we should get into some safe nook and get to know him,” Colene said brightly. “Because we don’t want to have to risk another anchor change; no telling what might come up next time. And Burgess is the only one who can free his anchor anyway. So let’s find out what’s on his mind, and see if our purposes align, and then maybe we can travel on together.”

Darius looked around. “This is only two realities away from—from Shale. There are probably similar creatures here, and we probably should avoid them until we know more about them. So perhaps we should travel until we find a reality that seems barren, or at least inoffensive.”

“Good point,” Colene agreed. “Nona, tell Burgess what we’re up to.”

“I will try,” Nona said. Darius had a notion what she was up against. Relating to an alien creature was no simple matter, but Colene acted as if it were just a matter of translating a few terms.

Colene shot him a glance. “No, I’m just trying to get something done, before anything worse happens.”

He tended to forget that his private thoughts as well as his uttered ones were shared with the others. Seqiro would limit communication if requested, but that would make it seem as if Darius had something to hide. So normally only his strongly sexual thoughts were excluded.

“Oh they are, are they?” Colene demanded. Darius was smart enough not to respond.

Nona put her hand on the creature’s knob again. “These are his contact points,” she explained. “Normally he touches one to a contact point of another of his kind, and they exchange information rapidly. In the way ants do with their antennae, perhaps. But I am alien, so the exchange is difficult.”

Then the telepathy faded, as Seqiro focused entirely on Nona. Darius was alone again.

Colene, never one to miss an opportunity, stepped up to him, ready for more kissing games. Perhaps with a demand to know exactly what sexual thoughts weren’t being relayed, relating to whom? But she hesitated.

“You—are—well?” he asked in her language.

“I’m not sure.” She looked around. “Is there something coming?” He was sure he had the essence, because her gesture and expression matched what he understood of her words.

“I—see—no.” Indeed, the landscape was clear. There were only bushes and trees.

“Something ugly,” she said. “Festering. Horror.” Or words to that effect. She kept looking around, as if expecting disaster to appear.

“There is nothing,” Darius reassured her. “I can tell by my feel for emotion. My power is working here, I believe.”

Still she reacted. Lines appeared in her face and her lips drew back from her teeth. “Awful. It’s coming for me. I know it!”

Then he began to sense it too. Because he was tuning in to Colene, and the ugliness was there in her mind. There was something—something that he had never found in her before. Not her normal depression, but something worse.

He took her in his arms. “Use mind-talk!” he urged her. “Show me the whole of it!”

She let him have it. Her telepathy was quite limited, compared to Seqiro’s, but they were in close physical contact and her emotion was strong. The ugliness expanded to foul his own awareness.

He felt frightened and ill and despairing. He wanted to flee, but couldn’t. It was as if a monstrous predator had locked his gaze to its own eye and would not let go. Moment by moment, that terrible grip strengthened, squeezing his mind and soul.

He tore himself away from her, and the awfulness diminished. “The mind predator!” he cried. “The thing that pursued Provos, our friend who remembered only the future. Now it is orienting on you!”

“The mind predator,” Colene agreed sickly. “Oh, Darius, get me out of here!”

He knew he had to. Because Colene and Provos had traveled the Virtual Mode together, and Colene had reported with mental pictures when they returned. The thing had threatened to destroy Provos, seeking her across the realities. They had escaped it only by fleeing through an anchor. It seemed to be a horror of the Virtual Mode, not a particular reality, and it could not pass out of its range.

He stepped to the horse. “Seqiro,” he said into the animal’s ear. “Break contact. Emergency.” Probably Seqiro could not understand his actual words, but the sound was enough to break his concentration.

The ear twitched. Then the telepathy returned.

“Colene’s in trouble!” Darius said. “The mind predator. We must go back through the anchor immediately!”

That got the horse’s instant full attention. Suddenly the horror invading Colene’s mind was blasting at them all. Nona screamed and sank to the ground.

Darius fought back, forewarned by his prior encounter with it. “Stifle! Stifle!” he cried. “Don’t relay!”

Then it stopped. The horse had damped out that aspect. In fact he had cut Colene out of the circuit. Nona climbed back to her feet, her eyes round with horror.

“Tell Burgess we must go back to his world,” Darius told her. “Now. Before that thing consumes Colene.”

“But it’s not safe there!” she protested.

“It’s not safe here! We shall have to go through and flee the other creatures, or fight them. Hurry!”

She put her hand back on a knob. The telepathy faded out again.

Darius picked Colene up. She was like a doll, mostly limp, but her hands and feet were twitching sporadically. The mind thing was making mush of her mind. He strode back toward the anchor, carrying her. The others could follow or not, but he was getting Colene away from the mon—