In a language that shares no discernible roots with any Cam has heard before, the short tailed boy exclaims, "Crash the sun!"
One of the others, too far away to help, moves as though to attempt a catch but gives up a moment later when the demon hits the floor.
"What did you do?" he asks his presumably-brother.
Cam sits up and shakes water from his wings. "You weren't trying to summon a demon?" he asks. He renders it as 'maker'. If they have a word for demon he didn't get it in his vocabulary dump. Outside chance they do have one; but the engravings aren't actually in a language he got from the summoner.
"In Aluvanna people are born with tails regularly and unremarkably," says tail number two. "Although never ones quite like yours. And there aren't common categories of people that I would think to call 'maker' and 'changer' and expect anyone to know what I meant. And people do not customarily appear out of thin air atop one's fire shield prototypes."
"Crash the sun," breathes the summoner. "Did I just save the world?"
A brilliant white glow collects in the air around him, reaching up and down to join floor to ceiling in a solid column of light. When the glare clears mere moments later, he has acquired a pair of wings, raven-black with silver-edged feathers, mantled in startlement. They somehow interact unproblematically with the shirt he was wearing.
"...I'm Ashras Kevarsin, and these are my brothers Inlaith," the quiet one, "and Elarron," the one with the recently acquired wings. "Well. You see, in Suranse, when someone feels that they have accomplished something substantial and magnificent and truly worth celebrating, they... get their wings. Not bestowed by a passing conjuror, but inherently, without outside intervention of any kind. And from that point forward the person is winged, and will never get old or sick, and has their own Sphere - which, before you ask, is a... place... that starts out house-sized and grows with time as long as its owner is alive. Winged ones can make portals to their own Spheres from anywhere they happen to be."
"Yeah. That's going to confuse people," says Ashras. "There's no way to get wings without the mysterious forces, around here. Anyway, this has been a fascinating look at the differences between our respective worlds, but this world happens to be kind of urgently in need of saving, and if you can conjure arbitrary objects you and any handful of combat casters can win the war by tomorrow if we play it right. Interested?"
"A hundred and fifty years ago, the population of this planet was around two billion. It's now half that, because a hundred and fifty years ago the Enemy arrived and started killing everyone. Every diplomatic effort ever made has failed. They're not interested in being bribed or appeased, they just want to wipe us out. They have superior technology and superior numbers - an apparently inexhaustible supply of them keeps showing up from somewhere outside the planet, past the range anyone could fly to even if they didn't have to dodge Enemy vehicles trying."
"Which may or may not indicate that I have walked into a logic puzzle where one of the triplets always lies, one always tells the truth, and the last may do either, now figure out which way to go in this maze by asking only one question, but at any rate your corroboration is not independent."
The triplets do, indeed, have fangs, if you look closely.
"Gravity is working just fine," says Ashras. "It points toward the central layer of the planet's shell. If you're on the inside, down is out; if you're on the outside, down is in. If you're in the floating jungle between the halves of the planet, or at the central layer of the shell, down isn't."
"And this is an extremely abnormal way for gravity to work! I mean, with a lot of engineering labor I might be able to rig something up with magnets... no, it wouldn't work that way either. This is not a thing that works. With gravity as normal. I can't make things in general with magical properties of any kind including abnormal gravity, so I hope you don't need that for your war effort."
"I have no idea what would happen if you got your... if you got more wings," says Ashras. "Maybe it's impossible. Maybe you wouldn't get any more since you've got the one pair already. Maybe the ones you have would become retractable. I suppose we'll find out when you save the world."
"The exact criteria seem to vary from person to person, and each person only gets their wings once so it's not trivial to study," says Ashras. "But having brought about the imminent saving of the world even by accident, even without a guarantee, is a pretty solid accomplishment."
"I'm more likely to be convinced by flying out to meet some evil aliens and having them shoot at me and not respond to attempts at parley, but maybe the audience with the king is easier to get, I don't know that I want to try operating a shuttle in this magic clamshell planet... What diplomatic efforts were there exactly that failed?"
"Title and author, sometimes I can make do with other amounts of information but 'topic' won't work unless I just produce everything published on this planet ever and narrow it down from there. Less impossible than it seems, still not a good use of an afternoon if you can improve on it."
"I hear you might be able to save the world," he says to Cam.
It doesn't get really weird until they exit the building, though.
The sky is green.
Well, debatably.
The majority of the visible area above the unsettlingly high and jagged horizon is taken up by a vast central tangle of unfamiliar vegetation, greyed by distance. Off to one side, a diagonal slash of brilliant golden light stretches across the gap between the two halves of the planet's shell, mirrored by an identical line precisely opposite it, although the latter is partly obscured by an outflung arm of the floating jungle. Near the first golden line stands a fainter vertical bar of silver light, less striking but still plainly visible; the place where its twin should be is more firmly obscured. Beyond the jungle, on the other half of the shell, faint patches of light may or may not indicate the presence of civilization.
Faidre Kevarsin takes no notice of any of this, only leads everyone away from the building and down a broad paved path. Outdoor lighting is sparse and dim. All the Aluvai seem totally at home in these conditions, but Cam might like some form of vision enhancement.
...Cam conjures up his computer. "Here is an animation of the solar system in which humans whom I was aware of this morning all live. It is to scale but sped way up. The sun is big. The planets are all spheres, these ones made of rock with air and water around the outside, these ones made of assorted nasty gaseous substances. Most of the planets have moons. Earth, the planet where humans are from, has one moon." He zooms in. "It's tidally locked, so one face of it is always facing the planet; and it gets all its light bounced off of it from the sun, it doesn't glow on its own. It, and the planets, and in the broader scheme of things the sun, all move principally according to a rule called law of gravity, which states in tidy mathematical form that things try to be near other things, especially when the things are big or close together. The moon is basically falling all the time and keeps missing the ground."
"I'm... not absolutely certain but I'm pretty confident. A feature I expect in non-weird physics is that it works mostly the same on things in general. A scale model of the Earth, well, the oceans would fall off because it would be small and therefore not exert more gravitational pull than wherever you were when you made it, but the rest of it wouldn't instantly collapse. Another feature I expect in non-weird physics is concise math, which I would love to hear produced to explain the presence of a 'sun circle' but I'm not optimistic."
Their destination is a stone building set imposingly atop a slow-rising hill. Winged guards patrol its terraces and balconies. It's not quite a castle, but definitely in that genre.
One of the pair is clearly a Kevarsin, with a Kevarsin face, Kevarsin wings - they match Faidre's almost exactly - and a Kevarsin tail. He is in the middle of making some sort of wry commentary not audible at this distance.
"Faidre. Troublemakers," he greets, with the faintest hint of a smile. Then he looks at Cam, noting the rounded ears and the goggles and the unusual tail. "Who's this?"
"I don't know what those things are because I am from a completely different world with an unrelated magic system and dissimilar physics!" chirps Cam. "Also I haven't decided if I want to make you weapons yet and cannot, given the aforementioned, guarantee that a light-wand isn't one. Who wants a donut hole? They're delicious." He holds out a donut hole, chocolate glazed.
"A light-wand is a solid gold cylinder, usually approximately six inches long, optionally engraved in useful patterns. It projects a beam of light when activated," says Inlaith. "Harmless unless you shine it in someone's eyes unexpectedly." He sniffs the donut hole but does not move to take it.
"I am told that you are under attack by evil aliens who don't believe in diplomacy," says Cam. "If this is true I am happy to either load you up on miscellaneous cylinders or just go blow them all up myself, whichever seems more expedient. But I have been told this by people who were selected for drawing what turn out to be really dangerous patterns on the floor, have no cultural or social context or way to verify anything I'm told, etcetera, it concerns me. I am genuinely concerned about your halved population and so on but I would feel really bad about it if your evil aliens are just misguided insectoids or something and then they were all dead."
"I'm indestructible," says Cam. "...Although I'm not actually sure I'm rated for legitimately magical damage. If the evil aliens deploy magical damage, or possibly Weird Physics Damage, I might have a problem, so maybe somebody should try to blow a hole in my wing or something first as a test."
"Anyway, stun might just plain work on me, and there's nothing stopping force from flinging me around, so if the evil aliens use comparable this-and-that it would probably be a little silly for me to just fly over to them and say hello, but I don't want to put anyone else at risk for what must seem to you all like deeply misplaced curiosity..."
"My manufacture is indeed arbitrarily precise, if for some reason you need all the molecules lined up in a certain way or something. If they hit me with a stun - which honestly is not even a particularly damning response from an army receiving an uninvited guest - I may well be stunned and then my fact-finding is cut a bit short. The thing that summoned me was a 'fire shield'? Are there other shields? Do they have to be enormous unwieldy metal disks?"
"The 'flavour' of a magical weapon or shield is controlled by the metal or metals that compose it; the strength of its effect is controlled by its size; other details depend on its exact shape," says Inlaith. "Weapons are cylinders, and shields are disks. Various engravings alter things such as the shape of the effect."
"Lovely." Cam makes one, peers at it, says, "Unfortunately it's really hard to get any sort of outfit that interacts well with wings which are, in fact, persistently attached to one's body," and then makes more of them, all attached, in two layers to cover one another's gaps and plated in clear diamondlike carbon substance. He drapes it over his shoulders, wings folded. "Give it a spin."
"Huh. I mean, I could make it more layers but that would make it really bulky and I was imagining the end version would have all of the kinds of shields there are... Maybe I could keep it to two layers, or three or four, and have them be really really thin and in stacks a few molecules thick? Anything the matter with having a fire shield directly on top of a stun shield et cetera?"
"It's one of the most basic principles of magical weapon and shield design. Strength is proportional to size. It's possible that with your ability to completely ignore the practical necessities of manufacturing and materials costs, you could help us develop a shield cloak that matches your ideals, but no one has tried to layer together hundreds of tiny shield-circles coated in diamond before so no one currently knows how to do that effectively."
"I mean, I might have a way around that sans escort if someone would like to help me test it out. I have no idea why I'm here and presumably you don't want to be rid of me as long as I am open to helping you with your evil aliens, but if summoning is working as normal, I can be dismissed at arbitrary range and re-summoned. Unfortunately, if summoning is not working as normal - if I am here now for some reason other than 'nobody else made that kind of shield flat on the ground in sufficient size before' - I have no way to predict accurately in what respects it's different. So testing would involve risking stranding another daeva here indefinitely."
"I am very interested to know how you can be dismissed at arbitrary range and re-summoned," says Dalvor. "I don't wish to strand another daeva here indefinitely, but if it would help win the war without significant risk of the stranded person causing more trouble than they solved, I'm not opposed to trying."
"I'm opposed to trying. Daeva are in general very dangerous, I don't object to the use of bindings for temporary summons but it's a hell of a thing to do to a person who's going to be around forever, and the first thing they'll try if it turns out they object to being stranded is killing their summoner on the assumption that the summoner must not be really trying to dismiss them."
"...I was thinking that someone could summon and dismiss another daeva and demonstrate that summonings and dismissals are both working the way that I expect them to, if they are, without risking sending me home and not being able to get me back. But. Daeva are really really immortal. If something goes wrong they will either be bound, forever, which is not all right as a permanent condition, or they will be loose and likely pissed off. I guess you could keep stunning one around the clock forever but that's not something I want to do to an innocent bystander either. I can think of one angel who might be okay with being stranded if nothing significant has changed in the last hundred fifty years, and I think they'd be okay with it specifically because they've always wanted to meet aliens."
"I don't know what precisely you mean by bound; I concede that it may very well not be all right as a permanent condition. However, neither is death. I am deeply, deeply tired of the rate at which my friends and subjects keep dying. My goal is to end this war, and in that I beg your assistance." He glances aside for a moment at some subtle signal. "Yes, Faidre?"
"I don't know if I could trivially destroy this planet because it's a weird planet and I'm not about to try it and see. I'm... still uncomfortable with bringing a non-immortal escort along but I suppose the situation is in fact lethally urgent for exactly the sort of person you'd be drawing the escort from. I can at least give them shield suits, I guess. I'll want to try using my computer to try to decipher their language if they have one and you don't already have someone who can translate."
"If they do seem to have a language and you don't know how it works it might be worth sending a drone - that's a little flying non-person device that can sort-of-kind-of-think - to listen in on them and see where I can get with that. I mean, they might just blow it up but a drone will be less inconvenienced than a person by extra weight from shields."
"Summoner concentrates on wanting rid of me for about a minute. Here is a circle that will get me, personally, unbound, if drawn on the floor with room for me in the middle of it. Don't fuck with the design." He produces a paper. "You may want to give me a few minutes before panicking in case you happen to finish the circle while I'm in the shower or something."
"I should warn you all before anybody draws that. And because one of you has already performed a summoning. Under the system I am familiar with - which does not include strange physics or evil aliens or anything like that - people who summon daeva become, on their deaths, daeva themselves. The alternative - again under the system I'm familiar with - is worse, but I don't know how any of this interacts with whatever you've got going on."
"Dead people look pretty dead to outside observation where I'm from too. They just also, simultaneously, appear in one of the daeva realms or Limbo. Limboites get to be indestructible but have no powers and the world is really boring, and I'm absolutely certain that if my Limboite pen pals had ever met anyone with a tail I would have heard of it, so I don't know that you'll land in daeva realms any more than you do in Limbo."
The edge of the planet approaches. Jagged teeth of landscape curve inward from the two halves of the shell. There are various installations visible at the edges - cables strung from one surface to the other across the vast cliff in between, allowing vehicles to be hauled in either direction. The planetary shell is pretty thick - but is it twice as thick as the Earth's crust? Hard to judge by eye.
Everyone pauses, drifting slowly out through the wide gap between the halves of the planet, to check and redistribute their weapons. At the end of this they are each carrying a minimum of one long staff and four wands. There is nothing in sight that looks particularly Enemy-like.
There is indeed a lot of that available, outside the planet. The arcs of the sun-circle and moon-circle are visible off to one side, and there is distant movement almost straight ahead. Another member of the escort points at it; Azair nods acknowledgingly.
"And there is the Enemy."
The drone perceives:
Flying vehicles of an unfamiliar design, made primarily of metal. Humanoid figures in and around these vehicles, operating them. Flashes of light that seem to encode transmissions between vehicles.
And, as soon as the Enemy notices, a barrage of force and fire and energy.
But when their handheld weaponry is insufficient to damage the new drone, they panic and abandon that ship completely. It self-destructs shortly afterward. Lights flash frantically, coordinating the rest of that group as they pick up the evacuated crew.
New groups of ships get spied on too! More data! (Cam's computer sprouts an extra processor insert.)
In all of the Enemy ships currently being spied on, the main topic of discussion is the sudden inexplicable ability of the [likely profane collective noun] to make things appear out of thin air, how worrying this is, and how the [likely profane collective noun] must be destroyed as expeditiously as possible before they escape this [location not fully clear from context].
"Yeah. The good news is that they are literally close enough to see, as opposed to millions of miles away, and I can just disintegrate them at once when I'm ready to give up on them. I'm holding out a sliver of hope that they just really wanted to harvest the shell of your weird clam planet and could be appeased with weird clam planet bits made by yours truly, though."
"Even non-commensurate. I'm not saying they're reasonable, I'm wondering if they could maybe be made to go away with an apology instead of a disintegration. You weren't sending messages into space, they definitely didn't send visitors who were treated rudely by random people who thought they were ugly, there didn't use to be an extra layer of planet that somebody wrecked thereby leaving them homeless, anything?"
"It stretches credibility to think something like that could have happened. It's hard to say for sure that it didn't - well, I expect someone would know if there had been an extra layer of planet within anything like recent history. But if there was a peaceful first visit, or any communication whatsoever, I've never heard tell of it."
Depending on what tradeoffs he wants to make about certainty and exact semantic content, he has several options, but one of the most high-confidence strings he can put together is "Speak to me; I am frighteningly powerful."
Everyone present near that mic freaks the fuck out.
"The [profane noun] can speak! The object-creating [profane noun] has followed us! DESTROY IT! DESTROY IT!"
They don't even bother evacuating this ship; it self-destructs with the full crew still aboard, waiting only long enough to flash lights at its neighbours and communicate the problem. They scatter further.
Cam hands him a thing. "This will eventually - depending on weird physics - have a delay of several minutes, depending on how far I chase 'em. But you can talk to it and it'll talk to me. Like so," he says to his computer, and his voice echoes out of the thing. "If I don't answer and there's not an obvious reason and the delay hasn't crept up high enough to explain it and I didn't tell you I'd be out of touch, then you unsummon and resummon."
Eventually, though - after many, many planet-lengths, a distance that approaches the legitimately astronomical - it becomes clear that there is an edge to this universe. And hovering in midair, very close to that edge, there is a portal no bigger than an ordinary doorframe.
The aliens stationed at the portal are frantically shooting down all their own ships that make it this far, flashing emphatic lights to warn them away.
"If the owners of both connected Spheres are dead, the portal is permanent. The owner of this Sphere must be dead, or we'd all need their permission to create portals out of it; I find it hard to imagine that the owner of the connecting Sphere might be alive, given that their Sphere has presumably been totally overrun by the Enemy."
"Well, that's inconvenient, I guess I have to follow them home. If you would like to check the inter-sphere-ability of these communication devices by stepping briefly into your own Sphere that would probably help, although my bet is that they don't work between spheres."
On the other side is... a very recently-abandoned industrial complex of some kind, situated in an open field under an unnervingly low sky. If he cares to look, it's reasonably obvious how the aliens were constructing their ships here to be passed through the portal in pieces and then assembled on the other side. The portal itself was extremely well-guarded until just now, but there are no aliens left.
Luckily, Cam can fly, and the lack of anything else whatsoever makes it really easy to spot the two other portals available. Presumably the aliens went through one of those.
"Hi! So the aliens really, really don't want to talk. They want to shoot ineffectually at me and then blow themselves up. A lot. There's a maze of spheres past the next one - it forks into two, and then one side's got five and one's got six, haven't gone farther than that yet. Do you have anything resembling a guess of how long it would take me to convince all these aliens to self-destruct?"
"Anywhere from a handful to hundreds. It's a very individual thing. And I have no idea what state these Spheres were in when the Enemy got to them - it's possible their owners tried to close as many portals as they could... it's also possible they didn't get the chance."
Cam makes a wired hookup between a thing and another thing on each side of this near portal and goes to the far side and says, "Testing."
The structure of this maze is really haphazard. As he progresses, though, it's fairly consistent that Spheres which contain aliens lead to more Spheres which contain aliens. (Some contain no aliens and very little alien infrastructure. Those ones are still, however, rigged to violently explode.)
This looks like an unusually large Sphere.
Actually, it kind of looks like a planet.
Actually, it kind of looks like a familiar planet.
Also, once he gets clear of the giant crater where the complex housing the portal used to be, no one is shooting at him and nothing is blowing up. There are no more portals in sight.
"I found a planet. I found a real planet. I found the planet humans come from in my world. You don't have weird physics, you just have a weird magic system which allows pocket dimensions with weird physics. This planet looks perfectly normal if somewhat the worse for wear."
Sentences such as the following begin to come clear:
"The others will destroy us!"
"They will destroy the planet!"
"We are befouled already!"
"I am frightened!"
"We are unclean!"
"I don't want to die!"
It tentatively peers out of the building where it and the others are cowering.
"Terrifying filth creature, I am [untranslated phrase, probably a name]. [More untranslated speech]. Please do not kill us. We don't know what you want. We are very afraid."
"Please do not befoul us," says the spokes-alien. "Although the [same untranslated plural noun] will likely kill us anyway."
"[Untranslated adjective]! [Untranslated adjective]! We're [untranslated adjective]!"
"Shut up [profane intensifier]!" says another alien to the one who thinks they're all [untranslated adjective]. The adjective-wailer subsides.
"The end of the world!"
"Shut up [profane intensifier], [probably a name]!"
"Shut up [profane intensifier], [name]!"
"Nothing else has stopped this filth creature, why would destroying the planet even help?" someone wonders.
"Tell that to the [same untranslated plural noun]!"
"You tell them!"
The spokesalien has nothing more to add at this time.
"[Untranslated] is the opposite of filth," explains the spokesalien. After a bit of digital hemming and hawing, the computer renders its next sentence as: "The purity-keepers maintain purity so that no one is contaminated by filth. This is the most frightening colony planet, because of the filth contagion, but until today there had not been an incident in many thousands of years!"
"[Untranslated sound]..." says the spokesalien, gesturing vaguely at Cam. It tries a few more phrasings, and the computer finally pieces together: "Grew wings. They had no wings, and then they grew them. Wings are a limb only filth creatures have. People have four limbs, but the filth creatures of this planet sometimes have six..."
"I don't want to kill you. I don't like killing people. But..." The aliens just call themselves "people", fucking typical. "...wingless people killed a lot of filth creatures - filth creatures," he adds, "are 'humans', and the humans don't want to die. If the humans don't want to die, and they can't stop being filth creatures, they have to kill the wingless people. Wingless people should stop trying to kill humans."
"Doomed!"
"Shut up!"
"Doomed! Doooooooomed!"
"Shut up [profane intensifier]!"
The spokesalien seems to have trouble processing this.
Meanwhile, behind the spokesalien, a scuffle breaks out between the doom-wailer and the doom-wailer-shutter-upper. It continues for a few seconds and then ends in an alien shoving past the spokesalien and barreling out onto the street, yelling about doom.
When Cam wakes up:
It is slightly more than twenty minutes later.
All identifiable technological objects on his person have been smashed, and someone has piled miscellaneous heavy trash on top of him, but someone has also put a pillow under his head.
All of the aliens who were cowering here have run away.
His comm relay network is down.
The section of the maze closest to this portal is just as he left it, but three steps in along the fastest route to Suranse, some clever soul has started slathering the ground with some sort of burning goo that produces intense heat and noxious fumes. There are dead aliens near many of the goo puddles, charred and corroded.
Ugh. It's probably faster to just keep layering stuff onto the goo until he finds something it doesn't melt or it runs out of melting capacity than it is to expect alternate routes to be any better. It probably doesn't melt literally every element on the periodic table.
One of the smaller Spheres a little farther along the route is filled with goo. It's oozing slowly out of the portal, but he'd still have to wade through chest-deep goo to cross this one. Odds of successfully bridging it with relays seem low. On the other hand, maybe restoring the network in the maze isn't as important as getting back in contact with Suranse so the Aluvai don't panic.
Cam makes a new one. "I'm back. Maze of spheres between here and Earth is full of various nasty stuff, slowed me down, wrecked the relays. Should probably have given me more than two hours the first time relays were wrecked and I was that far away. Anything interesting going on here besides the obvious and creepy?"
"Yeah, you're not going to be able to handle the same volumes I can as quickly. But however they're generating it they had to haul all their materials through a heck of a maze, I bet you can outpace them. You could turn it into air too but it'll be slower, densities are farther off. You can also outright shrink it and then turn it into water."
And he lets the both of them out of the shuttle and leads the way through the blob of water into the portal.
"They got around me while I was on Earth," he says. "So there must be multiple routes through the maze between clam planet and Earth. I didn't check the whole maze. Want to, as long as their current strategy seems to have been 'plug the hole and run like hell'?"
He makes another shuttle.
"They're not in the system. They haven't had time to get to Jupiter, let alone out of the system, if they were limited by the usual speed limit in Normal Physics World, so either they have a method of crossing vast distances instantly that is like but not identical to Spheres because they can't stand having wings, or they have a sort of spaceship that can travel faster than light. Which I want. And can make! But it will be an alien design I won't know how to pilot and I don't know which way they went!"
Except that there appears to be a pressure differential. Elarron yelps with surprise as air and loose objects, Elarron included, are drawn toward the portal.
And Cam steps back onto Earth.
And he starts playing Hilarious Infosec Hazard.
The conversation he had with the aliens was not written but it was recorded. Transcript. (Mostly) known plaintext attack. From there, bootstrap with a computer tower full of the complete written works in that language; it's bulky but he doesn't have to take it anywhere. Process that. He needs to be able to read a spaceship manual.
There are thirty-four inhabited systems in the galaxy, with a population totalling upwards of one hundred billion in all. Evacuation plans indicate that the ships departing Earth mainly went for the dozen or so closest planets.
He makes sure he knows how to operate the Earth gate into his Sphere, then gets into space and makes a prototype FTL ship and attempts to book it to Saturn to make sure it won't fall apart and strand him outside the galaxy or something.
He can't even save them -
He's just sort of hanging out here on this black hole, feeling like he had way too many cheeseburgers and deprived of his non-indestructible pants, what a day.
Ugh.
He does, however, know a way out of this. He has it prepared in advance.
He surrounds the orbital of the black hole where he's stopped with toenail.
And then he rises up from it on a pedestal of the same.
(1) The end of the world means we should all kill ourselves. You first.
(2) The end of the world means we are no longer governed by moral law, so we can do whatever we want...
(2a) ...and I want to go out in a blaze of hedonistic glory.
(2b) ...and I want to have one last [walk in the park/meal with my family/rollercoaster ride/favourite dessert].
(2c) ...and I can't think of anything I want so I'm going to protect the harmless pleasure-seekers from the kill-everyone faction.
(2d) ...and I want to blow stuff up.
(2e) [etc.]
(3) The end of the world is no excuse to give up on moral law, so we should do our best to destroy the all-powerful filth creature even though our efforts are totally futile. Does anyone know how that other planet created its black hole? No?
(4) If everyone would stop trying to kill each other maybe we could figure out something remotely useful to do about the end of the world.
(5) PANIC!
Hm.
Is anyone particularly sane-looking and useful, based on the communications available to eavesdrop on? Possibly so sane that he could send them a little autopiloted ship and bring them up and have a goddamn conversation?
"I don't want anyone to die. I am really annoyed that you people keep killing yourselves and each other instead of finding out if there is another way to make me leave you alone. However, in addition to not wanting you to die, I don't want the people who live in the weird physics place to die. They're called 'humans'. I want to be sure that you are all done attacking them."
There is a general chorus of "What?" "How?"
"This filth creature almost seems like it wants to cooperate with us," says another alien.
"If we can't even manage to cooperate with other people I don't see how we can expect to get along with a filth creature," says a third.
"Well, which is better: a world with both people and filth creatures, or a world with only filth creatures? Because I think those are our choices," says the first alien.
"An impure life is no life at all..." says the second alien, slowly.
"Come on, if you believed that you'd be out there rioting with the rest of them."
"I mean, you don't have to learn new words today, this is not nearly as important as the civil war or the identical civil wars probably going on on all your other planets, but it's really hard not to comment on. Do you have any clever ideas for how an indestructible individual with a matter-creation power could get everyone to stop fighting and ideally not commit mass suicide either?"
"Only you would think of academic publications at the end of the world."
"I'm making some really interesting discoveries about mineral formations!"
"It's a pity the planet isn't being attacked by talking rocks, then you'd be just the expert we needed!"
"Yes. But if I don't do things at people, then it seems pretty likely that eventually they'd come back to the weird physics place and kill humans. I'm trying to permanently solve that problem and it's really, really hard to do it when practically nobody will talk to me, let alone open treaty negotiations."
"Hush, dear, it'll be fine," says their parent.
"I'm not enthusiastic about going to the filth pit either, but everyone is probably too busy having civil wars to show up and blast it to ruin," says the third alien. "It might be our best option."
"I'm all in favour of the filth pit, personally," says the first alien.
"You're insane and morally degenerate," says the third alien. "But then, who among us isn't?"
"It's just that, well... who would want to live that close to something that horrifying if they had another option?" says the third alien.
"Plenty of people. Earth's population was small, but they weren't on the verge of collapse or anything," says the first alien. "And they did have evacuation plans in case something went wrong."
"Yes, and look how well that worked out for them," says the third alien.
"Does that mean we're all about to catch it from this filth creature who came out of the maze to destroy civilization?" inquires the third alien.
"Um..." says the first alien.
"Well, it is nice to meet you in comparison to most of the other people I have encountered today anyway," says Cam. "Will you need anything in particular to hang out on Earth for a while, or would you rather scavenge from what was left behind in the evacuation than give me a grocery list, or what?"
"I feel like it would be deeply foolish to arm you and it will take more time than I'm willing to spend at this moment to build you any sort of large complex architectural park. If you want a heap of food, and books to pass the time, I can oblige you as long as I know what you want specifically." To Earth.
"Who wants to come up with a list?" says Soto.
They start discussing what food and books they want in particular. It comes out that most of these people are really fond of books. Also, one of Tyastir's favourites is out of print.
"And is that going to stop the all-powerful filth creature?" asks Soto.
"I don't know, is it?" says Tyastir.
"Stop catastrophizing in front of the children, please," says the parent.
"I'm not catastrophizing!" says Soto.
"I don't know why you're obsessing over this when there's nothing we can do about it anyway," says the parent.
"Personal amusement," says Soto.
"Well, stop," says the parent.
"Besides, if the all-powerful filth creature named Cam cared, they could probably avoid associating with us closely enough to spread the contagion."
"Who's insane and morally denegerate now?" says one of the ones who haven't introduced themselves.
"Me, apparently," says Soto.
"Thank you!" says Tyastir.
"I hope you haven't befouled us all and doomed us to the torment of the filth contagion!" says Soto. "But apart from that, you've been very helpful."
Civil war! The responses to the end of the world here are approximately in line with what was happening on Soto and Tyastir's planet, but there are fewer people having productive discussions and more people defending the rollercoaster rides and romantic dinners from the rioters and omnicidal fanatics.
No. There are multiple competing theories about how the other planets managed the black hole trick in the first place, and much to some people's disgust, this planet doesn't have the facilities to pull off three of them and someone has already wrecked the particle accelerator that would be necessary to try either of the other two.
The filth student emerges from the bathroom. "Hey, whatever your name is! We need your expertise!" says Pyeki.
"What?"
"The destroyer of worlds wants to talk to you!"
"What?"
"If that's all it takes..." says the administrative type, glancing uneasily at the comm.
"We don't know!"
"Perhaps we should refuse to speak to the filth until we can find a volunteer."
"Filth creature, by communicating with us against our wishes you are risking contaminating us with a contagion that causes extreme distress often to the point of suicide," says the administrative type. "If it broke loose on this planet, it could destroy what little stability we have been able to maintain. We ask that you stop and give us eight days to construct proper quarantine protocols."
"Not to mention we are still being routinely attacked by rioters and degenerates," says the administrative type. "Filth creature, if you truly wish to avoid destroying any more planets, go away and come back in eight days."
This would be an unqualified disaster if the only players involved were him and this species of alien. But they were mid-third-genocide when he got here. There probably are not exactly four sapient species in this universe. They have to cope or - not cope. If they're not coping now at least they didn't generate another dozen planets' worth of - of art and history and small children to blow up first.
Next -
The one after that, apparently, is the ancient home of a secret cult who have taken the opportunity to seize power and start ritually sacrificing purity-keepers in gruesome ways. Apart from the ritual sacrifice problem, this is actually one of the most stable planets he's seen so far.
"Well, I would have been happy to file a flight path, Officer, but the people I was talking to decided to ignore me," says Cam, "so I didn't know how, and I didn't know to expect to have lights flashed at me so I didn't have computer translation set up for it. Please feel entirely free to impound the vehicle."
"Um," the guard repeats.
"If someone else wants to make war on the filth creature, they can wait in line. I am an atmospheric traffic control officer and my concern is ensuring that they do not continue disrupting my airspace with their unauthorized flight paths!"
Officer Eitamek makes alien facial expressions. "Only as an absolute minimum. When the system is functioning well, there are no midair collisions and no one fears that there might be. All vehicles in my airspace proceed to their destinations in comfort and security. Tell me, do you believe that comfort and security will be the feelings experienced by a local pilot who sees a winged filth creature flapping past their viewport?"
"I want to learn more about what you want to do, if it's not 'destroy filth creatures'. And I would like you to stop killing people. Maybe they're all so obsessed with purity that they'll kill themselves, but if you help them that seems like it risks bycatch of some who do not in fact want to die."
"In the realm of public action the prophecies direct that we must sacrifice the purity-keepers on the first day. After that, their former functions will be taken over by related institutions or abandoned as unimportant. Their contribution to maintaining public health was more ceremonial than practical anyway."
"Most things about the way your species is motivated are very strange to me. We could potentially discuss policy without touching on theology but I won't know why I should expect you're not telling me blatant lies. Incorporating the details of your apparently theological motivation would make telling me blatant lies harder."
"You have no place in our society and no understanding of our system, so the same information that is available to everyone else would do you little good," says the representative. "Traffic regulations are an example of the sort of thing that has not changed at all, and also an example of a rule you are required to follow. Besides that, and because you in particular are a filth creature, for public peace of mind you are encouraged not to bother anyone who does not willingly approach you."
"My fundamental problem here is that your species seems generally disposed to kill anyone else it meets, has done it twice and was working on doing it a third time when I showed up, and absolutely has to stop. While I very much wish that the prospect of having to stop wasn't so distressing that several planetsful of you have sucked themselves into black holes, it still has to stop. I am more than happy to leave any of you who can exist in the same multiverse as other sapient species alive and, even, eventually, alone, but it's very hard - considering your collective track record - to trust that you're going to build a stable culture which doesn't hold as a central value killing everybody it runs across. So I'm trying to figure out the moving parts of the culture this planet's recent revolution is trying to implement, so I know if it's safe to leave alone or if in a little while it will construct a war machine and kill some innocent people, the sort in the sphere maze or some new species you haven't encountered yet."
"...I think I understand," says Assistant Coordinator Sikyal Tegati. "And I think I understand why the previous representative was having so much trouble. The previous culture is something that every person in the world understands, so every explanation of the new culture relies on that understanding. But I don't think you have that understanding. Do you?"
"The destruction of the previous civilization came about because they were unable to cope with an outsider they could not eradicate," the assistant coordinator says earnestly. "But there is no rational basis for the eradication of outsiders! The existence of any thinking beings other than ourselves is supposed to be a fundamental moral wrong, but that is the mindset that led to planetsful of people sucking themselves into black holes. We don't have to think that way anymore, and if we do, we'll die."
"I'm not personally acquainted with the theories, but I think something like that is the explanation for why people kill themselves when they feel like they've been irretrievably befouled," says the assistant coordinator. "But the categorization of other sapient species as automatically filth is a separate thing. Ideological rather than biological."
"There's the planet that wanted eight days... and the ongoing civil wars... and a handful of people who I extracted from a civil war to wait it out on Earth... and you guys. And the places I haven't checked. Do you suppose that from this starting point your society could learn to live with the idea? Because otherwise it's going to be very hard to humanely supervise you and I don't think leaving you unsupervised is the best plan for the next while as things settle out."
"There probably isn't enough time to convince the right people to stop sacrificing purity-keepers in time to save any purity-keepers from being sacrificed, and if you somehow did anyway, it would still be really disruptive. It would... it's... the point of sacrificing the purity-keepers, and doing it in this way... it's that now the time of purity-keepers is over for good and we don't have to go around killing people anymore. And the message is being successfully communicated. Suddenly deciding at the very last minute not to kill the purity-keepers after all... well, people might get the idea that we weren't taking the 'not killing people anymore' part seriously. It would damage the consensus. And it's a good consensus."
"Look, if you think killing all the purity keepers is definitely the only next step that will do the trick I don't have nearly enough information to contradict you, billions of people have already died today and these ones aren't special to me in any positive way, but you seem like the least pro-death faction of your species I have run into and I'm just wondering if it seems weird to you that this project of minimized death kicks off with lots of ritual murder."
"I don't understand what else you think we could have done. I'm not happy that we're killing the purity-keepers, but it's working, and that's important. So unless you have the power to go back in time and destroy civilization over again until it works out in a way you like, I don't know what good it will do to analyze the aesthetic characteristics of the choice."
"Yes, but I didn't remark on it because I wanted to share my literary appreciation with you. I remark on it because I don't understand what principled distinction your faction draws between purity-keepers and other potentially appealing targets of violence. Do you want to kill any surviving purity-keepers on other planets? If their elsewhere employed loved ones try to save them or get revenge what's the stance on that?"
"The ritual sacrifice of purity-keepers as laid out in the prophecies is a very specific and limited thing. Any purity-keepers found here after the sacrifice period will be rehabilitated, or allowed to commit suicide or leave. Anyone who tries to interfere with the sacrifices is an ordinary person committing an ordinary crime, and the same with someone who tries to harm the people who carried out the sacrifices after they're done."
"The prophecies themselves are secret, but their policy effects aren't. They dictate that during the first quarter-day of the new order we must ritually sacrifice the purity-keepers, and then afterward all the things the purity-keepers used to do are either someone else's job or not done at all. And the killing-people parts are one of the things that now aren't done at all."
There are a few more of those - rioting, civil wars that don't look like they would benefit from intervention, planets destroyed by various means. He's getting toward the end of the list now.
The third-to-last planet seems to have reached some kind of functioning equilibrium. There are no riots currently going on, and when he arrives they send him a message using flashcode instead of attacking on sight. Granted, the message they send is "Filth! Leave us in peace!", but it's not accompanied by violence!
Sikyal, having become more informed since last he talked to them, explains that outreach is their planet's second priority after securing their own stability, and their planet will be communicating with the other planets and sending out more teams in a couple of days when things have settled down slightly.
"I think right now the thing to do is try to calm the unstable planets down and send envoys who aren't me to that one that wanted eight days, which you seem to have in hand. At some point I will ask the humans if they want Earth back, but I don't know if they will, they don't remember it."
"Oh, they don't currently have a head of state. The rulers of each province jointly form a council that oversees matters affecting the exterior of the planet as a whole, and decide their policies by vote. I'm expecting them to notice how inefficient this is sometime in the next few decades and come up with a new, even less efficient system a few decades after that." He pauses. "That was me mocking them for personal amusement; they do seem to be mostly floundering in the direction of a robust and functional government, with a few steps backward every now and then."
"That depends. You could just fly out of the planet and say boo, but that might turn out to be a slow and frustrating path. On the other hand, if you allow me to introduce you, you suffer the association of having been introduced by an Aluvai. Perhaps I should have Kyralaine pass you along. Have you met her? You've met her boys, that much I do know."