The Phoenix Girls, Book 3

Chapter 1-2

Erasmus floated upside down in a cloud of stardust, far above the gentle curve of a serene blue-green globe that was familiar from several of his favorite books. He was above the dayside but could see a rim of twilight creeping along beneath, eating up the bright colors. A bright tracery of artificial light etched the dark scarlet of the encroaching night like rivers of burning coal. The moon crested behind it, lending a certain pockmarked ambiance, not to mention a gravitationally stabilizing hand.

Erasmus moved farther away and shifted his perspective to include the other Earths stacked above and below, seemingly to infinity. Many were identical to the one he’d been watching, with their own moons, oceans, identical continents, and a few with their own traceries of electric light. Some had no moon, with deeply tilted axes and wildly erratic rotations. Many were green with life. Many glowed red with fire or radiation. Some were dead lumps.

But they were all Earth.

Erasmus searched for his and found one he figured was close enough. There was no moon, no eclectic lights on the approaching night-side, and a disturbing irregularity in the pitch, but it was home. He moved in closer until he could see the mass of islands where his people came from, the large one on the outer western rim where he’d lived. He hadn’t been there for a long time.

Ronan often told Erasmus that his obsession with the mysteries of the multiverse blinded him to the world he actually lived in. Erasmus often told Ronan to mind his own business, but had to admit to himself at least that his foxy old friend had a point. He thought he would be much happier if he could just let it go, but letting go was hard when you grew up in a culture that specialized in obsession, many of its more accomplished members spending the majority of their lives in speculative trances.

Their obsessions varied. Erasmus’s father had spent most of his long lifetime speculating on the planet beneath their feet; the internal forces that shaped and changed it over periods of time, creating land and oceans and the living things that covered it, and the great explosions and shakings that sometimes ripped pieces of the world apart in moments. The apex of a successful life was the moment when a lifetime’s speculation condensed into truth. His father had awakened from his last long trance and spent a sleepless year writing everything he’d learned, then died of exhaustion at the writing’s conclusion.

Most were not so successful. Erasmus’s foolish uncle Bilge had been convinced that rocks and plants had a lively inner consciousness and that he could make contact with the spirit of a favorite potted cactus by thinking happy thoughts at it while in trance. Bilge had spent several months cuddled with the prickly cactus, and it had been a young Erasmus’s responsibility to keep the plant alive and pluck the occasional spine out of his weird uncle’s hide. Bilge had awakened at the end of his long trance, uttered one of the foulest phrases in his race’s language, and died of embarrassment.

Erasmus was positively flighty by the standards of his race, which is perhaps why he’d done the unthinkable and left the island to explore the wider world beyond.

Mostly, he never regretted the decision to leave the island. He was a bit of an oddity to the assorted peoples of the mainland, but they had found him a useful oddity at least. There was always something interesting to keep him occupied, whether telling stories to entertain travelers at the inns that dotted the roads between the cities and villages, bartering for goods and lore with the manimal tribes that existed on the fringes of the wild, or fleeing for his life from the united avian tribes of the east. Life was interesting.

Things didn’t get weird until he met the Reds and started visiting other worlds.

For a member of a race that mostly exists on a single small island, traveling his own world was quite adventurous enough, but to visit another world ... That was not an easy sell, but the Reds had finally enticed him. It was in another world that he discovered his purpose, a thing called science. There were writings, tools, wild ideas and discoveries beyond anything he could have imagined, knowledge that might make the attainment of his life goal accessible.

But his association with The House of Fuilrix had gotten him into just the kind of trouble his people had warned him about when he left. Now the family he had once served had turned against him, hunted him, driven him into hiding, and would likely have him soon, whatever world he chose to hide out in.

Even the world inside his head wasn’t safe anymore.