(This will be the third Connected Worlds novel, after Fountains of Aescalon and The Monad Trap)
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My burden wasn’t heavy for augmented muscles, just a little awkward. Even without matris,the hardest part of bringing her down would have been getting her through the roof hatch. Spak doesn’t affect mass, it simply becomes a rigid structure, like a sculpture except even stone has some bend and flex; objects in spak stasis do not. I didn’t want to physically touch until the stasis was released; things get weird at a spakboundary, and the spak extended a few isevenths beyond her body. So matris was what I used to move her to the bed in the empty room. It was musty inside the unused room; Petra opened the casement I still hadn’t made glass for, a ‘honey-do’ that had to wait while a couple square of higher priority projects went first. Yes, Petra could have done it, but her priorities were elsewhere, too.
Indeed, Petra’s instincts about playing hostess kicked in as soon as she entered the room; before I could release the spak she was using the discipline of farza (aided by auros and matra)to turn the wooden casement into a glazed window, creating hinges and brace as well so it could be opened to let in air. It was acceptable in her mind for servants to have a casement; guests required a window. It said something of her mindset, that servants weren’t fully people, but that mindset was all too common even among the servants in Migurd. I was changing it when and where I could, but now was not the time. Then she asked, “Now husband, what role am I to play?”
“She’s been poisoned by nuclear decay. The energy released destroys cells, or worse, perverts their function. I do not know how much she was exposed to, and there may be secondary damage from where absorbed energy was re-emitted. I may have to repair every cell in her body individually. She may be within a moment of death, so if you keep her breathing and her blood moving while I do that, it would be much easier.”
“I believe I can do better than that husband. I have been learning thy ways; and I believe I can cleanse her blood and the cells within it.”
She had been learning. “Be aware her blood will be picking up more poison and detritus as I work. It can build to lethal levels several times.”
“Re-teaching me the first lessons of necris,milord? Poor helpless primitive that I am, perhaps I should stand aside and let thee assume the full burden?” She said it sweetly, but the message was more pointed for that.
“I apologize, O Lady of my heart. I get so used to dealing with natives who have not been trained I get locked into a teaching mindset. Thee hast made wondrous progress; the fault is mine.” Speaking in her archaic mode was one way of appeasing her anger.
“Then perhaps I may be of assistance?”
“As I said originally, thy assistance would be most useful. It would leave me free to concentrate on the fixed damage, greatly decreasing both energy and time required.” Healing this much radiation damage was likely to require every para I could spare. “An’ thee cleanse the blood as well, ‘twill make e’en shorter work.” I knew I’d taught her she’d have to keep cleaning it, but rather than risk re-igniting her wrath, I’d simply make a point of observing to make certain she remembered. If she actually did forget, then her nature would accept the fault as an error worthy of contrition. She may not have been perfect, but she most certainly was worthy of respect, and her soul really did shine.
I released the stasis and immediately began the process of healing.
Given that Petra was dealing with breathing and circulation, that released two or three para I would have had to detail to keep Gold Dust Woman, whoever she was, alive while I healed the rest of her. I used them in the most important area – her brain, where information was stored and where small amounts of damage would make the most difference. It was also the place where the usual method of healing cells was least useful. All cells of the same type will generally have the same structures, so they should be healed towards those structures’ commonalities. Examine one cell’s DNA for error, and it was difficult to tell whether it was healthy or damaged. Examine two of the same kind, and if they’re both healthy, they’ll be identical. If not identical, which is the undamaged to heal towards, or are they both damaged? So you examine three, or more, crosschecking between. Radiation damage is generally fatal with only a small portion of damage to each cell – the odds of the same damage in the same place between three cells is unlikely to be repeated in a living human body, even with all its billions of cells, and the errors had not yet had time to replicate. But brain cells stored unique information. Each brain cell’s state was unique in some way. But each cell only stored a few bits of each memory or skill, related memory was stored in connected cells, and there was overlap between the information. That overlap could be cross-checked. I couldn’t get the certainty I could in other cells by choosing a nine cell sample, but the vast majority could be cross-checked sufficiently that probability of error was low if I corrected towards correlated information.
I noticed fast that healing this woman used far more energy than it should have, even with the massive amount of damage due to radiation. A full rejuvenation such as I’d done for Edvard, repairing a body in its fifties to a youthful state in its twenties – might cost a bar of energy at most. Even a martsi could do it. Just healing this woman’s brain used more than a square – a strain for any mere wizard. Only a few outside the ranks of ultsi in my homeland would have been able to do it at all. Here, it was myself, Petra, our children, and nobody else I was aware of. Even had they possessed the knowledge, the power expenditure would have been beyond them. Otherwise, only divinities – those who’d bound themselves to one of the realms of Aescalon – would have the power. Had I not been able to draw essentially all the power I wanted, I might have aborted the healing and instead arranged for her to pass painlessly. That inspired me to wonder what I was working on, rather than who. I invoked Godvision as I worked.
Her aura was solid green, and there were scattered dots of blue.
Even Nulitaras wasn’t yet solid green, and I’d never seen any blue in a Godvision aura before. Hypothesis: This woman wasn’t a woman – she was a Creator, a step beyond Nulitaras and two steps beyond Petra and myself. Detailing one para to investigate further, she was bound by kored, auros,and mentis at least to all the surroundings of Migurd.
She had to be a creator – the Creator for Migurd.
That presented a moral quandary. It was an overarching goal of ours to bypass what we’d taken to calling the Monad Trap: Monads had no free will. Whatever personality they might have had at some point in the past was over-written in favor of new programming when they reached monad status. Our divine curses were magnified at every step. As an immortal, my divine curse was within my capacity to ignore, although without ultsi training, it had held Petra more tightly than any material bondage for ten thousand years. It was stronger as an eternal. I could hold it at bay, given strong enough reason. Petra, less practiced than I, could not yet. As monads, it would grow stronger yet, and push out anything extraneous to that curse. It was not an obvious trap, and all the more vicious because of that. Nor was there any evidence I was aware of that it was the original personality that returned when monads started to expand towards becoming creators. That might be limited sample size, or it might be because the two events were separated by so many years no previous acquaintance remembered the former personality.
But if there should be a vacancy at the creator level, we could step right into that vacancy, bypassing the monad trap. If the previous personality was never expunged by a divine curse, why should it change?
This could be an opportunity never to be repeated. Perhaps a third of tier one bubbles were uncontrolled, but there were over twenty million of them. Not to mention that would make us monads, not creators. But there were only 165 Connected Worlds, and we believed each one held a single slot for a creator. If I simply withheld healing, there was an excellent chance I would create a vacancy or at least the opportunity to displace the incumbent. All I had to do was nothing.
But my divine curse whispered back that I didn’t know it was even possible for eternals to promote themselves all the way to creator directly. Nor did I know that, even if successful, we wouldn’t be dragged through the chokepoint of the Monad Trap. Furthermore, this was a creator – judging by the state of Migurd, she’d been around for millions of years as a creator. It was possible she would be able and willing to answer many of my questions, and if not, it was likely I could trick her out of at least some of the answers, or reason them out by observing her.
I kept healing her.
By this time, I’d realized the reason it was so difficult to work on her – she had an entire instance of power behind her, and hers had enough power to never notice what Petra and I had behind us. That power wanted her stable, to remain in the same state she was in. If her power had directly opposed me, I doubted I could have fixed a hangnail. However, the radioactive gold dust had managed to overcome her resistance enough to cause damage. Her power now thought that damaged state was the ideal which should be preserved. Conclusion: Creator or not, she didn’t understand about radioactivity; a simple shield of matris would have protected her. Her lack of awareness wasn’t surprising; it had taken humans thousands of years to even realize radioactivity existed. But it also explained why I could heal her – Petra and I were only fighting something that could be characterized as magical inertia, not active deployment against our efforts.
It took over half an hour before I – and Petra – were satisfied we’d cleansed the effects of radioactivity out of her system. We’d used nearly four square of energy doing so. I’d fought duels that burned only a fraction of that power. When finally we were done, I used auros to wake our patient’s mind from its deep slumber.
She opened her eyes, closed them again and shook her head in an obvious attempt at concentration, opened them again, and said, “What have you done?”
She then fell unconscious again.
Copyright 2025 Dan Melson. All Rights Reserved
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