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AMBER
Boadice’s diary,
Session 76
Played on the 13th of February, 1998
Written by Jopie Schekkerman, based on a campaign by Astrid Tops.
called it the Flying Egg, but its real name was WHP-5-30-Prototype. Estefan
called it his inter-dimensional spaceship and it had been our home for the past
few days. The ship was more or less egg-shaped, with tubes along its side and
metal feet underneath. The tubes spewed blue wormhole power, hence the WHP in
its name. Two-thirds of the inside was filled with wires and metal things that
only Estefan understood, which left us, besides the cockpit, four little rooms
to live in. Estefan had a cabin that contained his bunk and a shower that worked
without water: it hummed at you until you were clean. There was a sort of central
room that contained a table and chairs and the machines that dispensed the food.
All doors came out unto this room, and it had a small ladder to the trapdoor
in the ‘ceiling’ where I had entered the egg. One room was filled
with tools and the last one was the storage area, which I claimed for myself.
The –for lack of a better word- dining room contained a console to the central computer, a thing which, as Estefan assured me, was NOT alive; it only seemed that way. I spent many happy hours behind that console playing the computer games Estefan had shown me. There were games that required the player to outmanoeuvre things or shoot them up but these were ridiculously easy. I found I preferred the more peaceful games, like the one in which I had a little world in which I got to raise little barely-intelligent creatures that, as Estefan again had to assure me, were not alive and did not really exist. They needed to be taught to speak and to eat, and I amused myself by giving them the names of former friends. The only drawback was that it broke my heart to see one lay an egg and then watch it hatch and put a new little creature on the word-that-did-not-exist. In the end, I spent most of my time playing a game in which you had to lead a civilisation from its settlement to greatness. You had to build new cities and wage war upon your neighbours, and you had to keep your scientific development going or you lost first the initiative and then the game. The concept of progress, the idea that a society could, and indeed should, grow and change was quite new to me. But if I disregarded the changeless aspect of Amber, the idea was not a completely ridiculous. About halfway through the game it got really fun for me when I could research strange new developments like superhighways and stealth bombers. The object of the game was to be the first to reach a nearby shadow by inventing Pattern-crystal replication.
But I did not spend all my time behind the computer. When he had time and wasn’t too shy, Estefan and I would talk and play cardgames with my trumpdeck, and I finished my trump of Sherwin. Many, many long hours were spent behind the window in the storage room, staring into Nexus space and thinking. The space outside the window was spotted blue and black, with the impression of incredible depth behind it. Occasionally shapeless blobs and coloured lights drifted by. I thought about Gran and Trisha, and about me, and about what I could do. If I thought Estefan was asleep I would cry a little, softly because the egg’s metal walls were too thin to offer much privacy. I am such a wuss! I still loved Gran and wanted him back, but how? I wouldn’t let him eat his cake and have it, I would confront Gran and ask him -- no, tell him to choose between Trisha and me.
And I still had a bone to pick with Trisha. It was really too bad that she was pregnant. ‘Too bad’ as too weak a word for it; I hated the very idea of it. It meant I could not take direct action, or indirect action, or any action at all against her until her child was born. I mean; I do have some scruples.
Then, behind that window, I had an idea. I still had Mardoc! Or, to be precise, Trisha still had Mardoc. Mardoc could be a back door into her stronghold, so to speak. When he still was my aide, we decided it would be useful if he could use trumps, so I tattooed my face on his arm and imbued the portrait with trump powers. That made Mardoc ‘real’ enough to use trumps himself. Sure, it also meant that now the Chartins had Mardoc, they also had a trump of me, but that is no threat to a trumpartist. The link the tattoo-trump created between Mardoc and me, maybe I could use it to spy on Trisha. It would not surprise me if Trisha’s child was not really Gran’s at all. According to Yurgo Chartin, Trisha had taken Mardoc to her bed, and I don’t think Trisha would give up her toy boy after her divorce was annulled. And even if Trisha’s child was Gran’s, she was bound to have a skeleton or two in her closet. If I capitalized upon the link between us, Mardoc could be my unwitting spy.
I liked that plan. As soon as I got home, I could start to work on it.
. . . _ . . .
Even with that wonderful idea to work out, my hours behind that window staring into space were not happy ones. I thought a lot about Gran and me; I needed the spineless cheating jealous little… Despite his faults he had many good sides to his nature. And let’s face it; it’s not as if good men grow on trees. Sure, there’s a literally infinite choice of shadow lovers. They can be fun for a while but you can’t have a relationship with them. They either grow old and die or grow bitter because you don’t. That leaves Family and lords of Chaos. The first is out of the question and of the latter 95% are utter bastards, already involved or not my type. So if you find a man that’s halfway decent, you’d better invest in the relationship.
Imagine me sitting behind that window, telling myself: ‘I will stop obsessing about Gran. I am my own woman, and mulling this over isn’t going to get me anywhere. I will find myself another lover, that will show him! I’ll just live my life and stop thinking about him. I wonder what he’s doing now… Well, I don’t care. I’m not going to think about it— When I get home I’m not going to take his trump calls and—‘
. . . _ . . .
Thoughts like this kept me from playing mind games with Estefan. They reminded me that love was not a plaything, and the poor man was in enough trouble as it was. The Nexus storm outside had been raging for more than ten days. For me it was an involuntary but badly needed holiday but to him the journey was ten days of ceaseless hard work. Sometimes, when things outside quieted down a bit, he would get 6 hours of sleep if I promised to wake him up when the alarm lights went on, but at any time some emergency he could not explain could call him back into the cockpit.
At the end of the tenth day, she storm subsided and Estefan went to his bunk
and slept for 14 hours straight. When he finally got up had had a cup of ‘I-don’t-like-to-explain-but-it’s-recycled’
coffee, he asked:
“Boadice, you do have the co-ordinates of your world, don’t you?”
I didn’t. I had trusted Estefan knew where he was going and anyway, how
many realities could there be? I suggested we would look at some ambient pattern
that Estefan could pick up on his gizmos and keep flying until it resembled
the pattern I remembered. Estefan did not like the idea.
“Flying on memory…” he said, frowning. “I could scan
you, that might work better.”
“What do you have in mind?” I asked, not knowing what he meant with
‘scanning’ and hoping it would be something tantric. Estefan took
a little box out of his breast pocket and pointed it at me, which I found rather
rude. I bent forward and tried to see its view screen.
“It’s a tricorder,” Estefan said.
“Is that like that Tamagochi you showed me?” I asked but that annoyed
him further.
“You don’t understand. The information is in you, you people store
it in your blood. Why you do that I don’t know; it’s very impractical.”
“You can’t loose it that way,” I said.
Estefan kept waving his tricorder at me, and I objected this ‘scanning’
was a rather intimate thing and that he should have asked first.
“Boadice, you don’t understand the gravity of the situation. Please,
step over there—“ Estefan pointed at a yellow circle on the floor
in a corner of the dining room. On the ceiling directly above the circle was
a second circle of the same size and colour. I stood where he indicated.
“I will scan you so I can determine the vectors of your Pattern. Then
I will correlate them with the data on several known realities, and enter the
results into the navigation system. It will be more accurate than taking a reading
by hand.”
Some Amberite instinct made me wonder if he was not keeping anything from me,
so I listened carefully to the sound of his words, and I guessed he wasn’t
telling me the whole truth.
“Is it not dangerous, Estefan?” I asked and I watched his body language.
“Well, no… Dangerous is not the word. You know, well… How
can I explain. Considering the gravity of the situation, it’s no problem
at all.”
I gave him a piercing look.
“Well… We don’t usually do this on people. With this…”
He squirmed under my gaze.
“It itches,” he confessed.
“It itches,” I said coldly, remembering Dara and how she had used
me.
“Are you sure that is all? Have you ever been scanned yourself?”
“Yes, of course, with a hand scanner.”
I gave him another long look.
“It itches, that is all! It is not pleasant and that is why we usually
don’t do it on people.”
I still did not trust the scanner, but it occurred to me that I trusted Estefan
in this matter, so I might as well give it a try. And besides, what was the
alternative? I did want to get home, eventually. I sighed and nodded my consent.
Estefan twisted a few dials and a whining sound filled the small room. A ring
of light appeared around my feet. It rose to the crown of my head and descended
again, and the tone rose and fell with it. I did not feel anything, and I told
Estefan so.
“Unicorn, what resistance,” he said. “I will have to increase
the intensity.”
The circles of light got brighter as he turned the dials almost a full turn,
and I got worried and told him to stop it and turn them back. When he didn’t,
I broke the rings and got out of the scanning circle. The whine died down.
Estefan grumbled that he had to start over again and that I should have kept
still, but I told him to can it.
“What was it, then? It didn’t hurt, did it?”
I demanded to know what he had been doing.
“I was tuning the scanner! It will have to go through you to get a scan.”
I explained that we Amberites are very tough, and that I did not like the idea
of something going through me.
“Nonono,” Estefan objected, “There is a critical point where
we are able to get the signature of a power without doing any serious damage.”
“Oh, if we are talking about the signature of a power--” I said
and took the tricorder from his breast pocket, “gimme that.”
I then let flow a measured amount of power from my fingertips into the sensitive
bit of the tricorder, but Estefan got annoyed because and the meters went all
over the place, and he yelled at me to stop that and that it would not work.
When I objected that we had not really tried, he clammed up and told me I could
just do it myself if I knew it better.
“I only tried to help, but if you don’t want to go home it’s
fine with me!”
He stomped off into his cabin, and I believe he would have slammed the door
if it had not been the kind that softly slides close by itself.
Men! I guess I stepped on his scientific and metaphorical male member.
After a while, I went into his cabin and tried to explain that I had many bad
experiences with people in this kind of situation, and that my trust had been
abused a few times.
“I only tried to help.” Estefan said. “All it does is itch
a little.”
“But it frightens me if something has to go through me.”
“That’s the problem if you store the pattern inside yourself,”
Estefan said. “That way, no-one can get at it. It’s unpractical.”
“That is how I am,” I said. “It’s not something I can
do anything about. I was born this way.”
“You make everything so difficult,” Estefan said
‘I do, don’t I’, I thought to myself, smiling where he couldn’t
see it.
“You see,” I said, “I might be pregnant, do you understand
that makes me reluctant to have my body experimented upon?”
“Pregnant?” Estefan said, almost insulted, almost angry. He took
the tricorder from my hand and waved it at me again. It beeped.
“No you’re not. You’re not pregnant at all.”
I took the tricorder from his hand and looked at it, but could not make anything
out of the lights and lines.
“It’s quite easy,” Estefan said. “Any idiot could do
it. It’s the first function they put on these things—“
Not pregnant. No baby.
I ran to my cabin to cry, and heard Estefan call out behind me:
“I thought you would be glad! You’re not pregnant. Aren’t
you happy?”
. . . _ . . .
And so, our little ship flew through Nexus space for another long afternoon. After a while, I decided that if the big scanner had not been able to penetrate, the little one was also bound to be wrong. I took the little tricorder to experiment with it. It turned out Estefan was right: it was almost impossible to keep my pattern still enough to get the ‘corder to give an accurate reading. Even at small doses the pattern I yielded vibrated in tune with my heart, my breath and my thoughts. I understood that for the big scanner to get a reading, I would have to be unconscious while it scanned me. I explained this to Estefan, who had calmed down also, and he went into the tool room to get a tranquilliser out of the medikit.
Determining how much of the tranquilliser I needed took some experimenting
and I insisted on doing it myself, but at last I staggered into the dining room
and told Estefan if he wanted to scan me he had to do it now. Then I sank down
on the bottom yellow circle and Estefan turned on the scanner. It was hard to
ignore the whine of the light circles so Estefan made the sound system play
soothing music while I meditated on the strange words he used, like ‘groovy’.
Suddenly, I started to itch all over and that took me out of my Zen-like state.
But it was over almost as soon as it begun, and Estefan told me he had a reading.
If I wanted, I could watch while he plotted it against the known readings on
the cockpit console. He had to haul me to the cockpit to show me.
On the letter-button pad in the cockpit-table he typed a long, long number,
and I got my first suspicions about the size of Nexus space. On a screen, a
huge three-dimensional picture appeared. I appreciated its decorative qualities
even though I could not make head or tail of it, but Estefan seemed to understand
what it meant. With a whizz and a burr, a dot of coloured light travelled along
the lines and bleeped when it found a dot of a similar colour.
“Got it!” Estefan said. Timidly, I asked:
“Estefan, how many worlds are there, exactly? Like mine.”
“Research is still in progress on that subject,” Estefan said, eyes
still on the console. “The quantitative question is still open, and it
is irrelevant either way.”
“Ten?” I asked. “More than ten? One hundred?”
I took a deep breath.
“A thousand? More than a thousand? Infinite?”
“We are not sure about an infinite. We don’t know what order of
infinity we are dealing with,” Estefan said, distracted, his fingers flying
over the letter-button board. “There are very many. More than you can
imagine, probably.”
Quietly, I swallowed a large piece of my pride. Infinity. As many Ambers as
there were shadows in my reality… That would make me… Something
like a shadowbeing. Insignificant. Not a word I usually associate with myself.
I was not as unique as I thought I was. But, that would make the Nexus as powerful
in this multiple-reality idea as the Pattern and the Logrus are to us in shadow.
That could not be right, it had never seemed that powerful, and you did not
need to be of any sort of blood to take the Nexus. Perhaps Alexander had been
right to take up with Monias, I wondered. Here in the Flying Egg I had not been
able to listen in on any of his or Murlas’ trumpcalls. But how did this
map out with Overshadow? And are there people who can travel between these multiple
realities like I travel between shadow, as superior to us Amberites as we are
to shadowstuff? Perhaps they would be annoyed that ordinary people had started
to travel between realities, and would seek to stamp us out.
If there were indeed an infinity of realities to choose from, why had Galoran
chosen to settle the Nexus in our reality first? Estefan jabbered on about infinity
and shadows but I had ceased to listen. What was the use? I went back into the
dining room for a plastic cup of tasteless tea and a good long think.
I had not yet reached any world-shaking conclusions when Estefan called me
from the cockpit to tell me we were almost there. And indeed, straight ahead
I saw a large something that shone with a soft white light. That had to be what
my reality looked like from the outside.
“Look!” Estefan said and pointed at what looked like a ray of light
coming from the general glow. “That’s odd!”
The beam swung backward and forward like a stick under water.
“Is it a predator?” I asked. Every place has its predators.
“No no,” Estefan said, “It’s a… Let me see…
I’m not sure, but I think… How can I explain... It’s like
a searchlight.”
“Aha. Like I said; a predator?”
“No. To make something like this, you will have to be reasonably civilised.”
This answer told me quite a lot about Estefan’s character and general
disposition.
Then suddenly, the beam swept over to us and hit the ship. Everything inside
lit up briefly, but when it hit me I gave off a blinding light, and it had me.
Estefan blinked and asked what I had done.
“Nothing!” I whimpered, and held on to Estefan’s shoulders.
“Ehm, I think we are being towed in,” Estefan said.
And we were.
. . . _ . . .
I could tell Estefan was frightened, but his fear did not come anywhere near
mine. I almost wet myself when I felt the light-ray pull at me, and Estefan
put the Flying Egg’s engines in reverse. For several long minutes, we
struggled. There was a mind behind the power that pulled at me, an evil intent
that was alive and wanted me, and it pulled and pulled relentlessly. I held
on to a chair but it was all in vain. Then I tried to use the Pattern as a defence,
but that only made the pulling stronger.
“It eats Pattern!” Estefan shouted above the roar of the engines,
and I grit my teeth and dropped the defence. It was too late.
With a ‘plop’ we entered the white light of my reality, straight
into the gaping maw of…
The great ballroom in Galoria.
I wiped the steam from the window to get a better view. Yes, we were in Galoria,
this was the ballroom where I had danced at Monias’ inauguration ball.
Monias and Alexander were standing by a table, and Alexander seemed somewhat
disappointed when he saw my face behind the Flying Egg’s window.
I told Estefan that we had found Alexander, to which he reacted quite enthusiastically,
and I slipped into the shower to vibrate the fear-sweat from my body. This is
far quicker than a shower, and I borrowed one of Estefan’s silver coveralls.
It took me less than a minute to get ready and I was calm and composed when
I followed my friend down the electric ramp that the Egg had extended, down
onto the ballroom’s marble floor. I smiled while I walked down the ramp.
This was not by far as bad as I had feared. As an added bonus, I might get the
chance to ask king Monias what it took for me to be allowed to take the Nexus,
although I suspected I already knew his answer. Monias would say: “Well,
if you swear undying loyalty to me and to Galoria, perhaps I can see what I
can do. And if you are very good, I might give you some training. But you will
have to prove yourself first.” I do not need another job. Perhaps some
other time.
Down on the ground, I greeted my cousin and King Monias.
“Hello Boadice,” Alexander said. “Been off making trips with
Estefan?”
“Apparently,” I said. “Been fishing for people outside our
reality?”
“Yes,” Alexander said, and Monias wandered off to look at the now
non-flying Egg. “I was searching for someone, and it seems you were also
near. And I am not experienced enough yet, so I got the wrong one.”
“Who were you looking for?” I asked.
“A member of our Family.”
“Obviously,” I said, but Alexander was being his usual un-cooperative
self, and as nothing more seemed to be forthcoming, I shrugged and turned to
see what Monias was doing. He had been watching Alexander and me in turn, and
shook his head while he looked at Alexander.
“We will have to do more practising,” Monias said.
“I had not thought she would do such a thing, but apparently she has been
making a little tour with Lord Estefan here. I have told you about him, remember?
We met in the reality of the Black Unicorn.”
“Yes, yes,” Monias nodded. “Well, welcome to Galoria!”
“Thank you,” Estefan and I said in unison.
“I understand you use wormhole energy to power the drives?” Alexander
asked Estefan.
“Yes,” he said, “we have been conducting research into-- Hey,
how did you know that?”
“It is obvious from the exhaust energies,” Alexander said but he
had paused just long enough before answering that I suspected a little lie.
“Ah, yes, you mean our new five to thirty converter. A real beauty, if
I may say so—“ and Estefan launched into a technical lecture that
I lost the threat of after the words ‘may say so’. Monias cut him
short and asked him if we could not park the ship behind the stables instead
of in his ballroom.
I looked at Estefan, and then at the doors that were not nearly big enough for
the ship.
“Could we pull it through a trump?”
“A whole ship?” Monias exclaimed. “Do you know how much energy
that costs?”
I had a fair idea, and I would have to be very fit to try it, but right now
I did not want to show Alex or his king the extent of my power. And besides,
it was not my problem.
“O never mind!” Monias said. Then he turned to Alexander.
“We still have some things to discuss. Let’s go find a conference
room somewhere.”
With those words, he left us, taking Alexander with him.
“Maybe we can take it out in pieces?” I asked Estefan.
Estefan was looking at the ballroom with the air of a practised tourist.
He said:
“I wonder, would this King Monias mind if I took some photographs?”
. . . _ . . .
To be continued.
