Jigsaw World (35 page)

He grabbed the morning paper to establish the
day’s baseline. They were still talking about the first contact
situation around Titan, but the specifics of the contact scenario
were under a secrecy umbrella, and all they would say was that the
contact had been made, and that additional contact team members
were on the way to Titan aboard a plasma drive fast
transport.

They had wasted a couple of hours with food
and conversation. It was 01:00 PM, and time to go get pretty for
their adventures. Karla could get pretty; Tom was content just to
make sure he was packing suitable weapons. When they hit the room,
they had just enough time for a standing Quickie before having to
don suitable clothing and accouterments for the trip.

It was about 01:50 when Tom and Karla finally
strolled into the parlor to meet up with Heimdall, Tyr, Veritasia,
Arpad, and the Seer. Tom had the Stone of Reality in a leather
pouch at his belt, along with the standard set of firearms and
blades. Not that he thought he would need the weapons. With two
Asgardians in tow, chances are that he would never have a decent
chance to field a standard weapon. If he had to strike at the
opposition, it would doubtlessly be by using his new paranormal
talent.

Cernunnos strolled over to the collected
group. “Once Tom has done his task tonight, the world should
finally be done with the visits to the Place of Beginnings.” He
said. “Do it right, and get it done, and tomorrow will be a party
day.”

“
Do you get nervous around
November?” Tom asked Cernunnos. “If I was you, I wouldn’t be
anywhere
near
deer hunting territory in the fall.” Tom
looked at Karla, then at a chuckling Seer. “I just thought of
that.” He explained.

The group watched a confused and somewhat
upset Cernunnos as he wandered away from their vicinity. The Seer
took a last look about, and turned to face the group.

“
Time to go, I guess.” He said. He
immediately turned toward the hallway door, and lifted his staff.
As the crystal at its head flared, the double doors swung open in
the now familiar response, and the bright mouth of the wormhole
gate was revealed.

The group moved into a slightly smaller area
behind the Seer, and they all proceeded through the hallway doors
and into the light of the wormhole mouth. At the other side, they
walked out back into the Place of Beginnings. Everything was as it
was the last time they had visited, except that the Tree of Worlds
seemed far healthier and much bigger than it was before.

The Seer turned back to the group. “As you can
see, the Tree is much healthier than it once was. It has absorbed
many of the nearest worldlines into each other, so that the energy
is not wasted duplicating the same worldlines over and over. You
can see it there, where Markus has used the Staff of Infinity to
prune the Tree.”

Everybody looked at the much thicker branches
that he indicated. The Tree represented a whole group of related
worldlines that had branched out from this point in space-time, and
so to cure any single worldline required that you also cure or
eliminate the related ones.

Everyone moved into their positions for the
task. The Seer stood in front of Tom, with Tyr at Tom’s back, and
the others ranged in a semicircle behind him facing outward. Karla
was the nearest of the defensive line to Tom, and she reached out
for a second and touched his shoulder.

Tom could feel her thoughts moving around
inside his mind, and he felt his power spiraling as well,
interacting with her connection to him, building and moving from
him to her, and back again. He would be busy with the Stone and his
task, but he was determined to use this power to defeat the
opposition in some small way during this task.

“
Tom, are you ready to complete
your task?” The Seer asked. Tom nodded. “Bring out the Stone, and
stand ready to place it where I indicate.” The Seer
said.

Tom pulled the Stone of Reality from the
leather pouch that contained it, and he felt it in his hands
humming with latent energy. As he held it, the Stone began to glow,
then it began to cycle from dim to bright, then it cycled up and
up, becoming brighter and brighter in step with the oscillations of
the Tree’s energy form.

Just as soon as the Stone was revealed, the
change mists sprang up around them, just beyond the still visible
wormhole gate that the Seer had left in place. The mists contained
ominous sounds and glimpses of motion. Tom could not quite make out
what moved within the mists, and he was splitting his attention
between the Seer and trying to make out where and when the
opposition would appear.

There was a sort of shadow which moved out
from the mists, almost like a parody of the shadows that the
Sorcerer created in his spell work. As it rolled out, like a carpet
made of shadow, the mists themselves cleared, and in the distance,
the Seven could see the forms of seven people walking toward
them.

The walkers walked closer, and the group could
see that each of them looked exactly like one of them. There was a
Tom, there was a Karla, and there was also a Seer, a Tyr, a
Heimdall, a Veritasia and an Arpad in the enemy group. It was as if
these were themselves just arriving at the Place of Beginnings, but
walking in from some other place, instead of traveling by
wormhole.

As the other Tom approached, Tom could feel
his thoughts turning, but they seemed to be
new
, and shallow, like
a likeness of his thoughts thrown together carelessly by an
indifferent copycat creator. The Seer took a moment to throw up a
shield against the intruders, and Tom noted with interest that the
Doppelganger Seer did not seem to be able to make any headway
against the shield.

“
These are not even true
Doppelgangers from alternate worlds. They were created by the mind
of this place to act against us, but they share only a small
measure of the power that we hold.” The Seer explained. “If all of
you will place a portion of your energy in maintaining the shield,
we should easily be able to complete our task without
problems.”

While the group’s attention was focused on the
opposition, the Tree had rapidly cycled up into high energy
oscillations, and the Stone had correspondingly cycled up in sync
with it. When the energy form of the Tree finally threatened to
engulf the space where Tom and the Seer were standing, the Seer
finally spoke.

“
Place the Stone there now!” The
Seer ordered as he pointed at a point at the center of the glow,
about four feet above the ground. As he spoke, Tom completed the
act, and when the Stone touched the Tree, there was a great
electric flaring, and when the flare waned, the Tree now stood in
splendor, its form now that of a massive Oak, with branches that
seemed to nearly reach the heavens.

Now that the task was completed, Tom was ready
to turn his full attention to the intruders. He turned to Karla,
who nodded and grabbed his hand. The connection between them now
felt permanent and the power sang inside their minds like a
sleeping god. It sang, and it spiraled, and it flowed, and with a
wordless agreement from Karla, he stoked its flames even higher,
and then he released it and pushed it toward the
intruders.

Where the power that he and Karla released
went, the light dimmed, and the landscape blurred, and the light
that passed through that space was inexplicably diminished. The
shadow of the power flickered from point to point, moving always
toward the Doppelgangers. Tom saw the other Seer and the other Tom
as they sought to counteract the approaching shadow, but to no
avail.

The power finally engulfed the Doppelgangers,
and the seven within the shadow stiffened, and the color drained
from their persons, and their movements became spastic and weak,
and finally, they were still. A moment more passed, and then their
bodies faded as well, back to whatever hell they were drawn from,
or into the hungry maw of the power that killed them, Tom was not
sure which.

The Seer motioned the group to cluster around
him once more. “The task is done, the opposition is destroyed, and
the Tree is now healed.” He said. “Only one more deed remains.
Karla and Tom now need to draw the Seed of Creation, and the Stone
of Reality from the heart of the Tree, so that it does not feed the
power of the worldline beyond what is desired.”

Tom and Karla stepped forward, ready to do
this thing, and then go home. The Seer looked at them. “Look upon
the Tree, and will that the artifacts Be returned to you.” The Seer
said. “If the artifacts desire this, they will return to
you.”

Tom turned to look directly into the light
that was the heart of the Tree, and he mentally asked that the
Stone return to him. He could feel Karla’s thoughts as she asked
the same of the Seed. As he continued to focus on the thought, he
saw a flickering movement within the light, and then the Stone
sailed out of the light, and into his hands. A second later, he saw
the Seed as it repeated the act, and returned to the waiting arms
of Karla.

A moment later, the couple had returned the
artifacts to their pouch and knapsack, and the group was finished
in the Place of Beginnings. Everyone checked and double-checked to
make sure that they had done everything they were supposed to, and
that they had everything they were supposed to have in hand, and
then the Seer did his flaring staff head thing, causing the
wormhole to accept them on the trip back to the
compound.

A second, or 73 years later, the group walked
out of the flaring light of the wormhole mouth, through the open
double hall doors, and into the parlor. The Seer turned back to the
wormhole, and with a curious movement of his staff, and a few
muttered words, he dissolved the wormhole back into the quantum
foam from which it had come.

Now the parlor was just a parlor, with double
doors that led only into a hallway, no longer to a place in a
different space and time. The room was stuffed with all fourteen
members of the group, with seven that were well rested and even
bored, and with seven that had a light case of fatigue, and a
genuine sense of self-satisfaction over a task well
completed.

The Sorcerer celebrated the successful
completion of the task by opening up a spot in the corner of the
parlor, which was shrouded in shadow, and into which one could
reach, and pull from it virtually anything one desired. Within
moments of his creation of this ‘wishing well’, the party had
already pulled gold, beer, a Jackalope, a plant that grew sausages
as a fruit, an oversized bat wearing a pair of spectacles, and
twelve identical miniskirts in twelve different colors.

Tom had failed to pull a book containing all
knowledge from the spot, and had then failed as well to pull a
chunk of Neutronium out of there as well. It seemed to work well on
foods and metallic objects. The Sorcerer claimed that it was a
simple nexus of Shadows, so that whatever you wanted, if it existed
somewhere in Shadow, would be accessible from the nexus.

The party was well stocked from the nexus and
from more mundane sources, and the tasks were done. It was ten in
the evening, with nothing to do tomorrow except to party. There
were days aplenty after tomorrow to think about what to do next,
tomorrow was just for partying.

Veritasia and Arpad told the rest of the group
in reverent tones about the power that Karla and Tom used to
destroy the Doppelgangers back at the Tree. The Seer assured the
couple that it was an impressive ability that he had never seen
before. He said that it would rival the power of Yama or Shiva, it
might even surpass them.

“
I got the impression that the
power itself had a barely controlled hunger” He said. “It felt
like, if you let it off of its leash, you could kill an entire
world with that power.”

“
That is the impression I got,
when we let it out to kill the Doppelgangers.” Tom admitted. “It
felt alive and hungry, and at the same time, it felt like an
extension of us.”

“
Whatever it is, cultivate it
well.” Tyr said. “We of the Aesir believe that all such powers come
into being for a reason, and they have a destiny.”

After a few more minutes of conversations
along the same lines, the focus finally shifted to what changes had
been made, and what the next few days held for each of them. Even
though they all ‘remembered’ both the old and the new timelines,
they still sought out the copy of the morning’s paper to see what
had changed in the headlines.

No longer was the current headline about the
First Contact situation around Titan. Now the main Headline was
about the successful testing of a warp engine yesterday. The
experimental ship had gone from earth orbit to a spot in the Oort
cloud region that was approximately 0.8 light years distant. It had
returned to a hero’s welcome.

The second item was the successful test of a
medical Nanotech device, which had basically brought a lady named
Norma, aged eighty-two, who was dying from terminal cancer and
multiple organ failure, back to health, and rejuvenated to a
biological age of 28. It had taken a lot of computing power, but
the tech promised immortality for the masses within a
decade.

The wonderful headliners from the past
timeline revisions were still around, but comfortably in the past.
There were colonies all over the Solar System now, and alien
contact happened over six years ago, which had matured into a
burgeoning trading post on Ganymede. All in all, the world was a
much more inviting place than it was before the healing, and there
were no monsters to be seen, except perhaps for the human
variety.