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“How old are you?” I asked, a little bit hysterical.
“Five, fifty eight, thirty seven. In decimal form, 21,517.” This guy wanted me to believe he’d been born thousands of years before my ancestors came to America. Literally Paleolithic Era. Humans were barely sapien at that point. It was too much.
He sensed my incredulity, “I told you, I’m from a long way away. Time runs in strange ways, and usually unevenly between places. Especially separated as ours are. My sister could tell you more than I can. She’s a specialist. I’m just about able to follow the markers laid down by others.” “In fact,” he said, “I’m not even certain I can get back once I’m done here. I assumed the Instance Portal went somewhere we’d know about, and have markers laid down. That’s a lot of territory, and most of us don’t have any reason to go outside of it. But this guy did.”
I got the picture- he wasn’t exactly lost but he didn’t currently know the way back. I figured he’d augmented my brain when he fixed my vision. “What are you? You wouldn’t have done that for a business deal. Why are you here?”
“Good question. Right now, I represent our government. I am in pursuit of a criminal, an agent of a hostile government. One who killed millions of our citizens in one act.”
“So you’re a cop?”
“Not as you understand the term. There’s more to it than that. But yes, I enforce the law.”
“What’s your name?”
“Osh Scimtar di Baryan. Call me Sosh,” he said, with a long O. I later found out “ScOsh” would be more nearly correct, but the c equivalent was soft in his family name and hadn’t been audible. I was speaking to him not writing, so it’s not important, but I think he deserves to have his name recorded correctly. You can imagine me calling him “Sosh” if you like.
“Why do you think this criminal is here?”
“I followed him through an Instance Portal, but he’d already Ported himself again before I got there. Instance Portals are major manifestations, trivial for anyone of us to follow them while they last, and for a few seconds after, specialists for years, given a chance to investigate. You’re bridging between two different instances of creation – it takes something strong to do that. Kind of like a monumental building. Even once it falls down, you can tell it was there, and where the bridge led, although that gets fuzzier faster than anything else. They fade over time, but I sent an amplifying signal when I arrived. It’ll take them some time to dig through the remains of what he destroyed, but they’ll be able to follow me here eventually.”
“Personal portals within an instance are different. You’re not punching a hole so much as stepping between two places. Unless you have them somehow tagged right when your target moves, there is no way even the Blue Prince can trace it. Maybe there are powers somewhere that can. But none we are acquainted with”
“Instances of creation… you mean different universes?”
“Not really. There is only one universe, but there are different instances of creation within it. Like rooms in a house, if you can find the doors between them. They may occupy the same space, separated in ways that cannot be seen without the appropriate senses. But they all connect if you know how. The connection to get between this place and where I am from is likely long and tenuous under most circumstances, but I think it likely that it has been used before. Your genome scans as human as mine, with only minor variations. I’d estimate the divergence at not more than about two thousand generations on your side. We have been places where that estimate is much larger, but they’re still people. By the way, have you anything to eat? I may be a wizard, but I still expend energy.”
He looked like he expended a lot of energy. Even my Mexican cousins down in the interior weren’t as thin as he was. But he was definitely a hardbody, all lean muscle. I’d known a racing greyhound – one of our neighbors growing up adopted one from Greyhound Rescue. He had that look – crossed with the grace of a leopard. He moved like a dancer. I got the impression nothing short of a cannonball could knock him off balance, and I’d seen he was fast enough that a cannonball was likely to miss. No leftovers worth the name in the fridge. So I grabbed a couple frozen dinners and threw them in the microwave.
“You mean we’re the same species?” I asked as they cooked, a certain spring in my voice. You show me a young healthy woman who’s not attracted to a man like that. Certainly she wasn’t the woman who looked me in the mirror every day. Especially not with her engine tuned up like he’d done to mine.
“Yes,” he responded, “There are some minor differences, but nothing to create a species barrier. I doubt you’d even need one intervention if humans from here wanted to breed with humans from back home.”
I was starting to regret not cooking something real. Mama taught me how to cook, I just didn’t do it much outside of the weekends. I sure wasn’t going to hesitate to throw over my occasional boyfriend if I could land this one.
He interrupted “I apologize again, but I almost can’t avoid reading your surface thoughts. It’s not polite to pry, but Guardians are telepathic, and you’re practically shouting at me. Had you grown up where I did, you’d have learned to guard your thoughts so as not to be doing that, but since you haven’t, I can’t help but be aware of your thoughts.” My face had gone red as a beet, but his voice became very gentle and he became very sad, as in remembrance of something, “I wasn’t hinting, I was talking biology. I am older even than most Guardians. I have had experiences you will never have unless life is exceedingly cruel. I’m not saying this to hurt you or insult you, Graciela. You are remarkable within the environment you’ve grown in, but I can no more be interested in you as you are now than you could be interested in a ten year old, and even if I could, it would be criminally irresponsible of me. My vision of self would consider me a spoiled child, with inadequate control over myself, and I doubt that I can convey the level of revulsion I would feel for such a person without more intimate mental contact than you would willingly permit.”
Copyright 2013 Dan Melson. All Rights Reserved
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