The Closed Gate

I lost track of how many I killed two hours ago. That isn’t the sort of thing one should forget, no matter what you are. Part of my training was to never forget anything, no matter what time would do to me. I am failing it. I find I do not have it in me to care, but that does not liberate me at all. They said that Crumoyx was just another colony world, made just before the human war against the Aendar ended. Unlike the Hingari, the Aendar could be fought. The war raged through space and time; thanks to certain sublight drives it was still going on in some places. But colonies were built to last, because of wars. It allowed them hide the Gate here. A door, a weapon, the kind of hope that wasn’t hope at all. You can call a weapon hope, but only if you know nothing at all.

It had taken years to find. Manifests, shipping records, faked accounts. Enough weapons and soldiers coming here to count as an anomaly. There were at least a thousand marines. Distantly, the fabristeel structure shudders under another explosion. Each trap, each bomb, each weapon I compromised. Poisoned food killed some. I hadn’t known that a Verkonis blade could break until it did, but I’d brought other weapons.

They sufficed.

It helped that many did not believe I existed. And fewer still understood what they were dying to protect. It made no difference. They died, and they died, and finally I entered the chamber.

The gate was left of centre. Not in the middle of the colonial compound, hidden by being unimportant storage. The records claimed it was part of the Lacuna network, remnants of the long defunct Niand Empire. A curiosity, a relic of a transport system long broken. They had two historians on staff to study it. Both turned out to be cyborg war machines. One of them broke the Verkonis blade. Somehow, that destruction did not level the world. Perhaps even such blades are not what they are advertised to be. It would not be the first time I had been lied to. I desire only this: that the gate was not another.

The room is made of stone. Old and real, the entire colony made about it. The gate itself is 8’ by 8’ and recessed into a wall. I activate six devices that are illegal across the entire Continuum. Two more after that, but the gate remains sealed. It is said that the Opal Key can open up even the dead and make them speak. It does nothing.

“You cannot open the gate.”

I spin. There is a human behind me. He is sixteen, not wearing any protective suit I can detect despite the fact that the poisons in the air should have burned the air from his lungs and stripped flesh from bone. “Hingari.” A shapechanger could survive this. “You do not belong here.”

“Not Hingari. You may scan me if you wish,” he says mildly.

I do. Human. Entirely, ordinarily human. “... no DNA reading it this – pure.”

He nods. “It’s not normally a problem, but you do have impressive scanners.”

“You are here to stop me.”

“I merely stated a fact. You cannot open the Tannhauser Gate.”

I fire a single entropy shot. I only have four left, and no way of ever getting more.

The human – catches it. Somehow, impossibly, holds it between two fingers and just looks... disappointed. “No one remembers. Sometimes I love that, other times I do not. They made eight Montauks, I was told after I found out about you all. Not knowing what they did. Firing you through time as well as space. Trying to win the war by changing the past. I wonder if even the Aendar knew how desperate that was, understood what they were playing with.”

“The Aendar are gone. I am the last of my kind.”

“I know.” He doesn’t move, this human of knowing.

“The Gate has weapons behind it. Monsters I can unleash.”

“It does, Monfour. But it can only be opened by a magician. And for all you are, and all that was done to you, you are not that.”

“What are you?” I ask, though some terrible instinct tells me that I must know. That it should be impossible for this person to know my name.

“The only one of my kind. I am Jay.”

“You are bigger. In all the stories. Monstrous.”

“Sometimes,” he admits.

“There are other gates. Other weapons.” And I activate my nature. Montauk. To leap through time. A voice calls out my name, behind me, and I flee. I flee. I –

I am in a room. A windowless and doorless room. And Jay is standing there, carrying a terrible calm with him. “You don’t get to escape my binding, Monfour, not even on Crumoyx, in the journey to ir or from it. Only Cruxy Mox ever did that, and not for long. All attempts to flee my bindings end up here; even I do not know why.”

I raise the gun again.

Jay takes it. I never see him move. That much, the stories all told as truth. “I’m not letting you kill yourself. Not like that.”

“You killed the others.”

“I have a duty, to time. An arrangement. And the other Montauks dared far worse than you.”

I gape at that. I was willing to open Gates to let monsters into the universe. “... worse,” I manage.

“The thing about gates is that someone has to make them. Someone has to guard them, if they’re say sort of gate, or at least make sure the hinges don’t squeak too much. You don’t want squeaky hinges, especially not on gates that should never open.”

He gestures. A flick of a finger, at once a summons and a command. I turn. The room has a door now. It is stone, and there is metal in front of it. A mesh of woven steel, the stone behind somehow alive, breathing. Aware.

“I made one gate so that anyone could open it. Because there would always be a chance it was needed.”

“What is beyond that,” I ask, and my voice has almost nothing of a Montauk in it.

“I don’t know. I think I made myself forget. I was ten once. Eleven the first time I came here that I am certain of. I didn’t find anything, but I think that is because I banished what was here. And that I put it behind that door.”

I turn then, and look at Jay. He is old, for all that he looks younger. Older than anything else I know of. They say he destroyed the Lacuna without trying. That the universe is safe from monsters because of him. He put them behind the other gates, I think. But this? I do not know what this is. I think he is afraid.

“What happens if I open it?”

“I don’t know.” His laugh is somehow like my own. “I am Jayseltosche, and every story about me is true, Monfour. Even the awful ones no one talks about. Sometimes I feel like my bindings are the only thing that hold the universe together. The rest of the time I am relieved this is not true. But I move through space and time in ways even you can’t understand. What is beyond that door I know nothing of, and there is very little I am certain I know nothing of.”

I do not move.

“I am very certain it is not jaysome. I do not know what will happen if you let it out, but I think you might well win your war.”

“Everyone will die.”

“And everything, yes. Memory, fantasy. All traces of the universe gone, the wild places of Outside no longer with this strange stable anomaly within it. That is the simplest outcome of opening this gate. It is what all wars become, in the end. You wish to destroy the past, to say nothing came before you to make a new future. And then it is all destruction, until you break bindings because there is nothing else to do.”

“How many have seen this gate?”

Jay smiles, then. Soft and sad. “Seven others.”

“And no one has opened it.”

Jay does not move. I step toward the gate. I hold out a hand. “You could stop me. You said no one can avoid a binding you make.”

“I could. Perhaps even in this place.”

I drop my hand. “I don’t win. No matter what happens.”

“It is a dangerous thing to think in terms of winning,” Jay offers softly. “The desire to make others lose is a dangerous one.”

“And does anyone win against you?” I ask.

“All the time,” he says, and there are worlds of meaning under those words. “All the time, or there would be no jaysome in the universe at all.”

I don’t know what he means. But I want to. For the first time in longer than I want to know, I want to do something other than kill.

“Help me.”

He grins, and the grin takes years from him. His laugh is young, and somehow free, and we are far away.

I expected Jay to remove something of my nature. To strip me of the awful weapons they put inside me.

I did not expect the hot springs. I think of a gate that anyone can open, and that Jay had no reason to take me there. I think of other things too, but let the water ease what it can instead.

Jay is not here. But he might come by, some day.

And that is reason enough to wait.