“Hm.” As the wagon halted, Zanshe stood up and stretched, then leaned over to open the door at the back and hopped out. “A good form of entertainment, but rather cking in personal interaction and contact.”
“Yep, that pretty much covers it.” While Aryennos put his book away, I passed Zanshe the bag of camping supplies. “Nope, it almost certainly isn’t healthy, not to the degree that it happens.”
“And this is the kind of game you are certain the Zombie King pyed.”
“I am absolutely certain of it.” Zanshe offered Aryennos a hand down, and I followed.
“And he thinks we are all just characters within a game, and he is the only person who is real.”
“Well, the Moss Queen is, and he knows I am, but mostly he seems to think of everyone else that way, yes.”
Zanshe, expression thoughtful, crouched and set the bag beside her so she could take out firewood. “I have memories of being a child, of my family, of learning the various skills that go into my art, of gathering trips with Serru, of sessions with clients, of events in my community. I believe they’re real and I’ve actually done them, but how would I know? Perhaps those could be false memories created by a computer to give the illusion of reality.”
I couldn’t actually tell them about the dream-memories that made it easier to cope with each new form as though I’d had access to it for a normal lifespan so far. “If that’s the case for you, then it is for me, too, and for him and the Moss Queen. At this point, those two have less reality than anyone I’ve met in this world, they’re just ft characters from a bad py.”
“I don’t see how anyone could ever tell the difference,” Heket said. “Experience is whatever your senses tell you happened and whatever happens inside your head. You do the best you can with that.”
“When I got here,” I said, “I wasn’t sure whether this whole world was real. I thought I might have had an injury or illness that was making me imagine being somewhere that couldn’t possibly exist. So I decided that if that was the case, there was nothing I could do but wait to see if someone got some help for me and helped solve the problem because I couldn’t do anything. If it was real, then I needed to try to find a way home. Since I couldn’t tell the difference, and only one of them gave me anything I could do to try to fix things, that’s what I went with.”
“That makes sense,” Zanshe said, arranging loose rocks into a ring on a bit of ground with no vegetation on it or close to it.
“I stopped thinking that this world isn’t real a while ago. It runs on different rules from mine, but it’s internally consistent and complex and wonderful and real. I haven’t the faintest idea how it is that there are simirities between it and the games from my world.”
“There’s very little violence here. That’s an enormous aspect that is not the same.”
“Very true. But if you took the monsters and combat out of an older computer game, it’s a lot alike. Here, and in those, water is water. You can drink water safely from a river or from the Gss Shallows or from a spring or a fountain, all the same water. In my home, water can be fresh so you can drink it, or it can be full of salt which is usually in the sea and it can be really dangerous to swallow much, or it can be halfway between. Some fish can survive in fresh, some in salt, a very few can swap back and forth. And water gets contaminated all the time by so many different organic and non-organic things that it’s enough to make you bang your head on a wall, considering how essential water is. Here and in games, three trees of the same variety that are the same age growing in simir conditions will be literally identical and they will grow in bursts that take them to the next stage. At home, three trees of the same variety and the same age might be very different sizes, and if they’re roughly the same size, they’ll have differences in the way the branches grow or the pattern of the bark or a thousand other little things. They’ll grow slowly and steadily without having clear and obvious stages. Even rocks here come in size categories, every rock of the same size is exactly like every other local rock of the same size. There’s a lot more randomness to that at home.”
“Random,” Heket observed, “sounds like the important term in that. Many more things are random, or at least impossible for living people to actually predict in any detail.”
“Accidental pregnancy,” Aryennos said. “And people going hungry and getting sick and dying early and not having the resources to do what they really want to do and I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of other stuff you’ve been avoiding telling us. A lot more is unpredictable.”
“Novelty has value,” Zanshe mused, setting the firewood in the centre of her stone ring. “To a degree, so does uncertainty in the form of suspense and challenge. But uncertainty makes people feel unsafe and insecure, less likely to take risks, or possibly more likely to take poor ones in desperation. It does happen, even here, but normally it’s short-term or in a limited form. If that is expanded to include uncertainty about whether one will have food to eat, a safe pce to sleep, a home and community, a productive job that allows a sense of self-worth, ways to treat any health complications that arise, resources to care for dependants, and not even the certainty that one will be alive in a month’s time and the knowledge that there is no coming back... that sounds like a situation that would lead to appalling constant stress and fear. Or perhaps a desperate need for distraction away from that constant stress and fear.”
“We’ve also talked before,” Terenei said, filling my double-walled gift kettle from the water bubbling out of a crack a hand’s width above the ground on a rocky slope, “about how some in Nathan’s culture think that which set of genitalia you have at birth determines more or less everything about what you must do and cannot do, including who you can be in love with and how you can dress. And consequences can be violent.”
“And for some reason, darker skin colour is supposed to make people less valuable,” Aryennos chimed in.
Zanshe nodded. “So to the rest of the insecurity, add in uncertainty about a considerable amount of personal freedom and safety from others. There seems to be an immense amount there that I would expect a community or a culture to unite to try to eliminate, rather than simply accepting its existence. That sort of chronic insecurity is not something I’d wish on anyone. Except possibly the Moss Queen. Even the Zombie King does less damage. People wake after being zombies with no sense of time passing, and it is virtually never more than a year, often less. People who have been mosslings remember far too much, and it is nearly always two years.”
That hate that Serru had mentioned didn’t only affect the people she’d touched directly.
“She might actually be carrying some of it,” I said slowly. “It’s probably not an easy thing to shake and I can still see traces of it. Although she’s been here long enough she really should have realized she doesn’t need it here.”
“And the Zombie King?”
“I don’t know how much of his is insecurity. There are men who py games a lot, especially the violent ones, who think women shouldn’t py games—please don’t ask me why, I honestly am not sure and I’d be specuting wildly. They actually tend to treat women like they’re objects or trophies or non-pyer characters anyway, as long as they’re young and sexually attractive, and other women and any other man who doesn’t buy into their idea of what it means to be a man is treated more or less like just background, non-pyer characters. People like that have done some very bad things, especially against women, and they are notoriously prone to being generally unpleasant with no sense of proportional response. If he genuinely believes that everyone around him is an NPC, then of course he’s going to be selfish and violent, but he’s had long enough by now to learn otherwise and doesn’t seem inclined to.”
“And the Moss Queen,” Terenei said, “who used to talk about harmony and peace, instead acts in ways that make her the most universally and deeply disliked living being in the entire world.” He handed the kettle to Zanshe, who set it next to the baby fire she was encouraging to grow, and fished our two new buckets out of the camping gear bag so he could fill them for the ornithians. They’d never get enough water just trying to get it for themselves from this spring.
“That too. I wish that I could say that either of them would stand out in my world but honestly, and horrible as the thought is, they wouldn’t. They’re both just part of the same kind of unpleasantness and intolerance that my world thought we’d won some ground against and now it’s coming back stronger than ever. They aren’t even the worst kind. They’re petty and opportunistic, mostly. They aren’t among the leaders or their most loyal followers who want to take away rights from, well, anyone except a small group of light-skinned men who have a lot of money, most of it collected by letting others suffer, and who believe that everyone else is at best inferior, although maybe useful to them, and most are just worthless and their lives and suffering don’t matter.”
That got dead silence around me.
I sighed. “Sorry. I never said my world was a kind and gentle pce.”
Terenei wrapped both arms around me in an unexpected hug. “I’d rather keep you here where it’s safer and not so awful, but it sounds like they need every voice against the badness. So we need to get you back there.”
I leaned into the hug. “Part of me would rather just stay. But family.”
“Of course family,” Aryennos said. “But I wish we could help.”
I couldn’t keep from smiling. “Maybe just remembering that people don’t have to be mean to each other will help.”
“I hope so,” Zanshe said. “But if those two come from a pce that is so saturated in so much that is selfish and short-sighted and cking in compassion or kindness, it might go a long way towards expining why they are the way they are. You’re looking around and seeing a world you’d like to live in. Those two, however...”
“He’s in a world where everything is the exact opposite of how he thinks it should be,” Aryennos said slowly. “He can’t make it be that, he hasn’t managed to make us change in big ways in over a century, but he can still think the whole world is wrong and act that way.”
“As for her,” Terenei said, “this world is exactly what she initially cimed she wanted and thought was perfect, but it turns out that isn’t what she wanted after all, she wanted something more like where she came from but with her deciding who has rights and who gets rewards, and all her attempts at changing it to match what she thinks it should be have failed.”
“So they are both angry,” Heket said. “And presumably deeply unhappy because their anger is getting them nothing except being alone, disliked even by each other. They will be much more unhappy if Nathan turns out to have a potion formu that will unmake zombies and mosslings.”
“Assuming I can ever figure out what a morning star crystal is,” I grumbled.
“Questions are still spreading,” Terenei said. “You keep doing your Find Nearest and maybe we’ll come into range of one. Serru asked a lot of people. My grandfather is still asking. I told him why. If there is any information anywhere in any archive or that any alchemist has ever come across, it will be found, believe me. Aryennos isn’t the only librarian who can walk into an archive and always find what he needs as long as it’s there somewhere, and there is an ever-increasing number of people who are very highly motivated to figure out what it is. They know there’s no guarantee. It’s worth it just for the possibility.”
That gave me a mental image of messages spreading, alchemist to alchemist, from them to family, to friends in other callings, into school and civic libraries everywhere, all species, all ages, all genders, everyone searching everywhere they could think of for any reference to one mysterious crystal. Because if this world was anything, it was interconnected, and if they had a motivation to contribute to any quest, it was this one.
“Thank him for me. Y’know, next time we pass a post office.”
“I will. Again.”
“Meanwhile,” Aryennos said. “I know hugs are great and essential but maybe you should stop hugging and have some fruit until the tea is ready. No one wants you to lose your voice.”
“And there is wisdom,” Zanshe chuckled. “There are cookies in my bag we can have with lunch. The baker that made that cake st night thought we might like them to snack on while we travel. We cannot currently save either world but we can look after each other and ourselves.”
