Chapter 2

I now remembered the last few moments of my previous life. My name was Ursus Enlil. I had been lounging atop my tower while admiring the lovely bay that spread to the west. The tower was attached to a comfortable house. The house was located on a large beachfront property. The bay was a natural deep-water harbor that handled a great deal of shipping, and the clipper ships with all their sails were beautiful as they glided along. So were the young women on the beach.

I had discovered the node of the multiverse I was living upon. It hadn't been prime real estate when I found it, but I had been the first leader of the terraforming project that was still in the process of turning much of the world into a garden. Before we had started, the highest form of life on the node had been blue-green algae. Now, fish filled the oceans. Birds and squirrels and trees and flowers surrounded me. We had done good work, and our successors on the project were still doing it.

I actually said to myself, aloud, "Life is good," just before I felt an immense magical attack strike me. Apparently, so many years without enemies had made me soft, for the attack had caught me by surprise. I hadn't had time to identify my attackers. I hadn't even realized that someone had wanted me dead.

The next thing I remembered was being a disincarnate spirit floating in the Metaphorical Aether--the physically unreal space that surrounds the nodes of the multiverse. I came to the conclusion that my body most likely had been destroyed. However, over my centuries of wizardry, I had enveloped myself in many layers of protections. Some of them, apparently, had managed to preserve my consciousness, at least for a time. That consciousness, though, was bound to be slowly decaying without a body to maintain it. Therefore, I needed to install it into a new body.

I considered the problem of finding a new body. I wasn't a murderer, so I wasn't about to steal a body that someone else was using, even if I could figure out how to do such a thing. A freshly dead body, on the other hand, was liable to have problems, so that was a last resort. I could take over a recently conceived embryo, but that still struck me as wrong. It felt like stealing someone's child. What to do?

I pondered for a while before I came up with a solution that I found ethically acceptable. It was dangerous and desperate, but I didn't have a choice. I reached out with my senses for magic, which can't be described to those who don't have them. The Metaphorical Aether was filled with loose magical energy--call it manna (it has many names: manna, mana, potentia, amorphia, etc.)--and I gathered some of it to me. Even bodiless, I still had much of my wizardly skill, and magic was particularly easy to do in the Aether.

I created an algorithm to search the nearby nodes--nearby metaphorically, not physically. I wanted a married couple who desired children but who were mutually infertile. Ideally, the couple would have at least a comfortable level of wealth, as would the place where they lived, and it would be politically stable. If possible, my would-be parents should look enough like me that no one would question that I was their son.

The node needed enough responsiveness to magic that I could accomplish what I intended to do, but it couldn't be protected against the meddling of ethereal beings such as my current self. It also needed enough loose manna available that I could someday leave that universe.

I turned several copies of the algorithm loose and fed them manna steadily. It was an immense amount of energy, but I was an experienced wizard used to dealing with such power. I refined the algorithm as it worked.

I didn't have an objective way to measure time, but subjectively the search was a long process. Whenever the spell found a candidate place and couple, I spent some time observing it and them and created a ranked list of choices. I continued the search as long as I could but eventually noticed that my sense of self was beginning to decay. It was time to move on to the next step of the plan.

I selected the top couple on my list. As a spirit floating in the Aether outside the node, I couldn't do anything large within the node, but what I intended was subtle rather than grand. In this node of the multiverse, the instructions for creating a person were chemically stored, and the instructions in the germ cells of my candidate father had become slightly scrambled, rendering him sterile. Fortunately, I could ignore his somatic cells; I merely had to fix the scrambled code in the cells that created sperm.

Even more fortunately, I didn't have to know in detail what was wrong with his genetics. I was a wizard working with magic, and magic is controlled by visualization and metaphor. I only needed enough understanding to create a good metaphor for his problem and then manipulate the metaphor to solve it.

In the Aether, magic was easy enough that I could create and implement the spell entirely mentally. Very roughly, I created a detailed vision of a knotted string squeezing his testicles. I then untied the knot. That is the gist of a great deal of ritual and mental preparation.

Fixing his sterility was payment for what I was about to do to him and his wife. I created a much more elaborate ritual. Its result was to send into his wife's womb the instructions for creating my new body. That was a tricky bit of work that involved a duplication of my substance in protoplasm--a zygote to be precise.

I also made a metaphorical pocket to store my personality and memories and attached that pocket to the growing embryo. The memories would begin to be recalled by my new brain shortly after it reached puberty. Any sooner, and I risked damaging myself with memories an immature brain was unequipped to understand. My final memory before my transition to a new life was of launching the spell that poured my essence of self into the pocket.

Either I was going insane, or my plan had worked, and I would assume that I was sane until proven otherwise. To sum it up, then, I had a new life and a new body that had lived independently of the rest of my memories for more than eleven years. If I had done everything right, my new body would grow up to be a near copy of my old body, and it would have all of my old memories.

Upon consideration, I decided that it perhaps had been unfair to stick my essence into the child who had so far grown up without me. I plead desperation. When I had made the plan, my focus was on saving my life, and I hadn't taken the rights of my clone into consideration. It was utterly thoughtless, and I felt the beginning of an immense guilt building. Nevertheless, to my great good fortune, the eleven-year-old part of me hadn't been overwhelmed and subsumed by the ancient part of me. To my great humbling, he didn't even seem angry.

Hey, old man, thought Arthur. After I got over being scared, it started to get interesting. Am I going to be able to cast spells and stuff?

That's the plan.

Cool. I could forgive a lot for that. Anyway, you're already starting to feel like a part of me, and it's pretty hard to be mad at your own--Arthur grasped for the right word--appendage.

Hmph.

Moral pondering done for a while, I reached out with my senses for magic and "felt" for loose manna. I had a vague feeling that it was nearby, but I couldn't reach it. It looked like it was going to take me some time and effort to figure out how magic worked on this node.

Man, when you were in the Aether, you just pulled it in like picking grapes, thought Arthur.

Different places have different rules. Part of the danger of going to a new node is that one doesn't have a feel for the rules.

Is being a wizard dangerous, then?

It can be, especially if one is stupid. A magically inclined idiot can get himself into all kinds of trouble, Ursus thought.

You're not an idiot, are you? Arthur asked.

I sometimes have my doubts, but your brain is a genetic copy of my original. You tell me.

I mostly spent the rest of the day actively remembering. Other than that, I got examined and prodded some by the medical staff, and I walked up and down the halls a bit. At about four in the afternoon my parents came to get me. They had some clothing for me and the rest of the clan in tow. After they received final instructions and signed some forms, I was free to go.

There was a chill in the air when we left the hospital. It was the sixteenth of November, and there was no doubt that winter was on its way. We all piled into Mom's van, which had three rows of seats. Mary made sure Susan was buckled in beside me and then took the other end of the bench seat beside her. Mary was almost exactly one year younger than I was. I had been born on February fifteenth, and she had been born on February sixteenth one year later.

Susan was four years old, and she was definitely going to be the last of the kids. Susan had been an extremely difficult pregnancy, and Mom was no longer able to bear children, which I suppose was just as well.

Mom and Dad had got married about a month after Dad graduated from the University of Michigana with a degree in mechanical engineering. They had badly wanted children, but none had been forthcoming. Ursus's memories now informed me why they had gone from being thirty-year-olds without kids to forty-somethings with a large brood relative to their time and place.

Rich and Charlie were relegated to the middle bench, where everyone in the van could keep an eye on them. They were ages eight and six, respectively. They weren't horrible as brothers went, but they always seemed to be under foot.

Although I was the oldest, Mary was the true chief kid. When the younger ones had problems and the parents weren't available, Mary was the one they went to. She liked taking responsibility for her siblings, was even tempered for her age, and had a heart that was bigger than her chest. I, on the other hand, had always been introverted, moody, and felt somewhat distant from the others. Physically, all five of us kids had the same dark brown hair, blue eyes, and generally resembled each other, so nobody would doubt that we were all siblings, despite my not actually being one. That last thought bothered the Arthur part of me. I wasn't related to my family.

Dad drove. Rich and Charlie stated making funny noises as they played with a couple toy cars. Susan asked me, "Are you going to stay home now?"

"I think so. Did you miss me?"

"Yep." She must have been contented with the extent of the conversation, because she started humming to herself. Mary reached out and brushed her little sister's face with the back of her fingers.

This is insane, Ursus thought.

What?

You've belted yourselves into this steel box, and now you have it hurtling along at speeds far in excess of what are safe for an unaugmented human body. Worse, you are surrounded by other morons in similar contraptions all doing the same thing. Does this infernal vehicle have any safety devices besides these straps?

Well, it has brakes. My hand was cramping up from the force of its grip upon the armrest. Loosen up. You're hurting us.

Does it have an automatic pilot? Anything to keep it and these other automobiles from colliding?

Even as he asked the questions, Ursus gained access to my relevant memories, but I answered him anyway. No, it's all up to the driver.

Fortunately for Ursus's nerves, the drive home didn't take that long. Home was a three-bedroom, brick, ranch-style house in a dozen-year-old or so tract neighborhood. Dad and Mom had bought the house when they had found out that they were finally going to be parents. For its time and place, it was nice enough. It had a kitchen/dining area, living room, family room, a full bathroom with a tub, and another bathroom with just a shower stall. Part of the basement had been turned into a recreation room with a pool table and bar.

Chapter 3 »