" - oh?"

"If you have something from a given world, something you can—focus on, channel through—there's a sorcery ritual that opens a portal to it, from anywhere. The problem with it is that it's not always stable, and if all portals between two worlds close time desyncs. I have a... hypothesis... about why that's the case, and if it's correct then for as long as at least one door made with the key is open to that universe any other portals will remain stable, but if said door closes then the portals can also close at any time."

" - so you could find a world, force a door to there somewhere way out of the way and leave it open, and then force other doors as convenient?"

"Not force a door, doors and portals are different. If I find a world, that's the only place I can open a door to it from, but once I find said door to a habitable world someone can fetch something that can serve as a focus and I can use that to open other portals as convenient. The problem with that is that the door itself may be somewhere extremely hard to reach—inside the ocean, in space—so a plan that has less points of failure would be opening several portals to a world and keeping people who know how to reopen them on both sides so that if one ever closes it can be reopened and time never gets too desynchronised between worlds."

"We can definitely supply that. Time could still slip pretty badly, right? Or is there a bound to how far a world can get ahead of another -"

"There's not a bound that I know of, but if there are people on both sides who can reopen a closed portal, both sides can try to do it as soon as they see it closing so the world whose time is passing fastest will succeed first, and the most time lost that way will be as long as it takes someone to notice and reopen the portal. And having multiple portals open to the same world should mitigate some of the need for that, I wouldn't expect all portals to a world to close simultaneously, but this should work even if they do."

"Is there a way to test this?"

"I have appropriate foci from most inhabited worlds I visited, although if my hypothesis is correct portals there will be particularly unstable. I could just find a bare one that's stabler for that, though. It's still risky to test before we have at least one more person who can open portals."

"What's your hypothesis about the instability?"

"I think there's a certain measure of... distance... between worlds. Not in three-dimensional space but somewhere else, some higher-dimensional thing. I also think worlds move in this higher-dimensional thing. And worlds that are—closer together—can hold stabler portals. And I think the key is strictly more powerful than sorcery portals that way, because I don't think connections opened with it can break at all."

"And those worlds are, as a consequence of your having found them long ago, far away?"

"Yeah, exactly."

"Makes sense. If worlds drift over time then eventually the portals will be in trouble, right?"

"That depends a lot on how this high-level cosmology works. There's another world, we call it Elsewhere, it's where sorcery comes from, and portals to it never close, so there must be some way to do that, although that may be a property of Elsewhere itself. It's possible a high enough number of portals open for long enough can keep worlds from drifting apart, and it's more likely that doors opened with my key also do that, but I'm speculating at this point."

"Well. We can certainly deploy people to check on and maintain portals."

"But if that works... then there's the question of where to put the first portal."

"Make people send you bids? Tapa'll probably make the strongest case, and be happy enough to go along with whatever reds scheme you like for it."

"Really, Tapa?"

"If I had to put up a guess, yeah."

"Why?"

"They're feeling the population pressure the most - they're the largest country, coming up on two billion, and until recently importing a lot of their food. And they're competent enough to put a compelling bid together."

He nods. "That makes sense."

"Might depend what conditions you put on it. Anitam's better equipped to jump through some hoops with respect to reds."

"...I don't really want that much I just don't want people to die pointlessly just because other people don't think they're useful anymore."

"I know. I talked with Crystal about one approach -"