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ADDENDUM A (found in world js-122)
I’m writing this from a coffeeshop at a world that is quite a lot like my own. That’s why it’s me here rather than one of the Khans; they tend to be a little too flashy for a place like this. If you’re reading this, of course, you’ll have read Jamie’s account already, so you’ll know all about the Khans and about me, too – though I suppose I’m a sort of a Khan now as well, but Macready has always suited me well enough to be going on with. (Though Jamie, if you see this, as I hope you do, you ought to know we missed you terribly at the wedding!)
Anyway, as I was saying, I would have felt quite at home in this world if I didn’t already know the nightmarish sorts of games They’d been playing here. When I told Adam about it he got very excited and started talking my ear off about horror-based gaming and arcane lore, but that’s Adam imposing his own ideas on things as usual – as far as I can tell no one here is going around muttering about Yog-Shoggoth or anything like that. Still, whatever you want to call them, the horrors haunting this world are certainly extremely nasty, and unfortunately it’s only got worse since They stopped playing; They didn’t want the game over too soon, you see. The Khans have been worried for years that the place will go completely under and let these particular nasties out to start bothering other worlds as well, so I try to check in every year or two just to do what I can to stave off the worst.
Now, I’d had a suspicion for a while that Jamie must have been doing the same as he made his rounds, and that perhaps that was the reason that things hadn’t gone to pot so soon as we all feared. I couldn’t be sure, though, til I saw one of those Homeward Bounder signs carved on the side of the building.
Of course I recognized it at once as one of Jamie’s private jokes, and I got quite excited to think we might have some news of him at last. I went straight into the building – all of my demon-hunting equipment started to go wild as soon as I crossed the threshold, so I had to stuff it all in my purse to keep it quiet – and talked my way right past the front desk and up to the archive. This is one advantage of being quite so pregnant as I am right now: people do find it hard to say no to you when you’re standing there really obviously wishing that you could sit down. Even the unpleasant individual at the archives department didn’t send me packing straight away, though he did look as if he were really suffering every moment he had to make polite conversation with me.
“I won’t keep you long,” I said. (The unpleasant individual looked both relieved to hear it and annoyed that I’d wasted his time saying it.) “I only wondered if you’d ever come across a boy called Jamie Hamilton. He might have brought some documents for your collection?”
The unpleasant individual squinted at me through his glasses. "Hamilton… yes, that rings a bell." He dove back into his files, squinted at a cross-reference sheet, and then pulled open an enormous cabinet labeled DISCREDITED. It was absolutely jam-packed full of files, and he took ages going through it. I thought it looked terribly disorganized, but I thought it best not to risk offending him and being kicked out before I got the answer. Finally, he retrieved a thick sheaf of paper that looked about the same size as the copy that Jamie left with us. "Here it is," he said. "Statement of James Hamilton, regarding the Flying Dutchman, the Wandering – er –” He checked a note on the front, then rattled off, “I’m required by institutional policy to disclaim that primary source documents often may include language that can be considered offensive by contemporary standards – statement of James Hamilton regarding the Flying Dutchman, the Wandering Jew, and other folkloric figures.”
I was nearly dying of impatience by the time he was done with all that, but I gave him my warmest smile anyway. You catch more flies, etc., and in any case he looked so tired of me already that I quite liked the idea of killing him with kindness. “Thank you so much,” I said. “Did you by any chance meet Jamie when he brought it?”
"My predecessor's time, I'm afraid. It says here that she recorded an accompanying interview, but the tape seems to have been lost.” He looked once again at his cross-reference sheet, and then down his nose at me. “That said, given the outlandish nature of the story and the lack of any corroborating evidence or witnesses, I’m afraid our professional assessment is –”
“Well,” I said, “I’m a witness, to begin with.” I pointed at my name on the first page of the document. "That's me.”
The unpleasant individual’s brows drew down, as he looked at the place where I was pointing, and then shot sharply upwards. He looked back at me, and said, flatly: “‘Vanessa, the sister who Adam wanted to sell as a slave?’"
“Personally, I should have preferred 'the brilliant young doctor,” I said. Trust Jamie! He could be as bad as Adam sometimes. "Or 'the person who stitched me up after I was fatally stabbed.'”
“Fatally,” said the unpleasant individual, even more flatly.
“Well, he couldn’t die,” I said, irritably. “But it would have been fatal, under any other circumstances. You’d know if you’d read the document carefully.” Then I reminded myself I was meant to be killing him with kindness, and smoothed out my face and voice. “But of course I know you must be very busy. You’ve really been having a time of it in this world. I’m certainly not here to tell you your business – but I might recommend you take it out of your ‘Discredited’ cabinet and give it another read. It might do you some good to take it seriously.”
The unpleasant individual gave a noncommittal hmm. All my kindness did not seem to be going very far. Perhaps Jamie had had more luck with his predecessor. The sign he’d scrawled on the wall outside – YOU CAN TELL THEM YOU’RE A HOMEWARD BOUNDER – might have suggested yes, or the opposite. I’ve never understood Jamie’s sense of humor really.
“Well,” I said, “I do appreciate your time. It’s good at least to know my friend was here. It’s been a while since I’ve heard from him.”
I must have looked sadder than I meant, saying that, because as I turned to go, he offered, rather diffidently, "Should I contact you for a follow-up if we find the interview tape?" And he sounded almost human when he did it.
I shook my head. “It won’t be possible.” I wished I could have said yes – it would have been all right for some of the other worlds I visit, but the Khans are all in agreement that it would be a terrible idea to let anyone here have access to the traverses. "But thanks for the thought. Good luck, anyway." Then a thought struck me, and I said, "But I might come by again before I leave with an addendum of my own, if that's all right."
“We close at six,” said the unpleasant individual. “Er – you could make a statement directly, if you –”
“That’s so kind,” I said, feeling my demon-hunting equipment vibrating away in my purse, and left to go find a coffeeshop – and that’s where I’ve been since then, writing this up. I’ll ask them to keep it with Jamie's manuscript, just in case Jamie does come back here to check in, the same way I do.
And while you’re checking in here – Jamie, won’t you come visit us as well? I know you know your way around, but we do worry. If you don’t turn up Konstam’s likely to want to name the baby after you, which seems to me a bit maudlin. Helen thinks you wouldn’t like it, either. But of course if you’d like it we’ll do it. Do come tell us one way or another, won’t you?
**
ADDENDUM B (found throughout series 12-49-mxtxB)
My name is Joris, and I am a freedman and a demon hunter – though I understand that in this world those are not so fashionable anymore. I live in Khan Valley, of the demon-hunting Khan clan, but I suppose I spend as much time traveling the worlds these days as I do in my home.
I have just spent a good long while traveling a really interesting circuit of worlds that has gotten me to think in a different way about some things in the document which you will have just read before seeing this. It began while I was taking some readings about demon activity in a world that has quite a lot of magic and not very much technology. They used to play a lot of games pitting demons against humans here, but since They aren’t stoking things up anymore the whole place has made some quite remarkable strides. In fact when I got there everyone was preparing for a wedding between some very important human and some very important demon.
Now, knowing demons, I thought perhaps the human had been brainwashed or coerced into this, so I went to go see if he might need help. That’s why I was taking the readings, to see if he was under a demon’s power already. But when he saw my equipment he got very excited and started demanding to know where I’d gotten my electronics and if the latest game consoles from his home had come out yet, which is how I came to realize that actually he didn’t belong in this world at all.
Of course I offered to help him try and find his home straight away if he wanted it, but he said, no, he’d been in this world some time and was really very happy here, and anyway it would disappoint his groom terribly if he had to call off the wedding. Then he asked rather wistfully if I had anything he could play games on just for a taste of home. He was in luck there, as it happens – though I didn't say 'oh, as to that,’ I can’t really think that I ever said it to Jamie more than once no matter what he made out, and anyway I truly don't see how it's such a joke to be prepared! – so I let him play the training simulators that we keep for the younger Khans. After that we were quite fast friends and he told me all about how he came to be here. He’d never seen Them – at least not that he remembered -- or heard about the traverses. All he knew was that he’d read about this world in a book, so he knew it wasn’t real, and then found himself here with a lot of rules to keep to ensure that he kept to the part that he’d been assigned in play.
Well, even though my new friend couldn’t remember meeting Them, this all sounded awfully like one of Their cheats to me. If you remove a person from his own world, and put him in one that he knows (or thinks he knows) is surely not Real, it seems to me that it might have much the same effect on reality as kicking people along from world to world as they do the Homeward Bounders.
The more I traveled through this circuit, the more I found this kind of thing going on. Perhaps They started experimenting with this during the years and years between Jamie’s exile and Helen’s – They must have had some way to deal with random factors that came up then – or perhaps this is a new game, and we will have to come into this circuit of worlds and deal with Them all over again. Or perhaps it is something entirely different that’s playing games with reality here that I don’t yet understand.
Either way, I have been leaving copies of Jamie’s manuscript every place I can as I go, along with this addendum. To be honest, I don’t know that adding this extra part is at all the right thing to do. It could change things in ways I don’t understand; I’m not a theorist, just another demon hunter who walked the Bounds for a little while when I was young. I know I have got to talk to the rest of the Khans, and to Helen – and the person we call Uquar, if we can find him, though he’s quite a difficult person to get hold of. But I don’t know yet when I shall be back this way, so I can’t risk not leaving it, and I do think it’s important. People need to understand that the world they are in is not any more or less real than the one they came from – that what is Real is Real because it is Real to them. Anyone can choose for the world they are in to be Real. They can choose for the people in it to be Real. It doesn’t matter if it’s where they started out, or if they first read about it in a book or not.
To be honest, I am writing this for Jamie. For my friend Jamie Hamilton, whom I have not seen, now, in over fifteen years – my friend who’s afraid to have friends, in case they become too Real to him, and he accidentally thinks of them as Home.
You see, though I know it is quite foolish of me, I have gotten a little bit hopeful from learning about all of this. There are so many ways of shifting reality round between worlds that I can’t think that we’ve understood the only way to do it. I can’t believe you’ve really got to go on doing this forever.
I know hope is dangerous. I know what it could mean. All the same, Jamie – won’t you at least think about it?
PS: I’ve made sure you’ll have to read this if you come through this circuit by talking you up to everyone I’ve met in every place I’m leaving this. If you’re embarrassed, serves you right; I’m sure I wasn’t half so embarrassing about Konstam even back then as you’ve made out I was, so consider this your payback. I’ve told them you’re fifteen feet tall for a start.
**
ADDENDUM C (found in nearly every copy along traverses xA7, xD11, xR31, and xZ29 intersecting at the Temple of Uquar)
BY ORDER OF HELEN HARAS-UQUARA
(the great one, the high priestess, the living blade)
BE IT KNOWN to all of Uquar’s many hands bringing this, the light of truth, to the worlds that should they encounter he the MAKER OF THIS BOOK
(the ever-wanderer, the traverse-teller, the child-sacrifice)
HE IS TO BE CAPTURED
HE IS TO BE BROUGHT BEFORE THE HIGH PRIESTESS
HE IS TO BE DELIVERED UNTO HER JUSTICE
and should he protest, he may be told: this serves you right, for you have abandoned your people; you have broken your vows; you fool, did you think we would just let you disappear?
So commands Helen Haras-uquara, the great one, the high priestess, the living blade. This sacred duty is incumbent upon all those who serve the House of Uquar. MAY THE WIDER TIMES COME IN OUR LIFETIME.
**
ADDENDUM C-1 (handwritten at the end of Addendum C in world lfb-7)
Jamie –
Everyone else said I ought to rescind this order when I stepped down. But I was right to do it and I won’t take it back. I have left binding instructions for everyone who comes after me: as long as there’s a House of Uquar, whoever’s in charge is going to have a religious duty to do exactly what I would have done if they’d found you while I was in charge. It’s your own fault for being such an awful coward and I hope it’s mortifying.
My only regret is that I wish I could be there to see it myself, but I have been High Priestess for far too long. My successor is quite terrified of me and the only way to get her to do anything useful is for me to leave her alone. Of course I am sure she or whoever comes after her will eventually make a mess of it, so I have left a few prophecies in place in case I wish to return to set things to rights some day. I shan’t abandon my people – unlike some people I could name – but I have other things I need to do as well and it will do them good to be without me for a while.
For now I have settled down in one of the worlds that my Hands have discovered on their journeys to spread the truth of the worlds. It is awfully nonsensical and I shouldn’t like to stay here forever, but it has two great virtues and I am going to tell you about them.
The first is that a great many traverses seem to pass through here. This is true even though it is surrounded by a ring of worlds that have been completely destroyed by radiation, where nothing remains but sand. Nobody with any sense would wish to come here, and yet my Hands have collected testimony from many Homeward Bounders who have – especially the ones who were sent to the Bounds as children.
The second is that there is some kind of magic over the whole place such that no one who is here ever grows any older than they already are.
So you see, I have got time now. As a child walking the Bounds, you’re bound to show up here someday, and I can afford to wait.
And if not – well, I shall simply be waiting here in hope, shan’t I?
That’s the part you haven’t considered. You might be hopeless yourself, but the rest of us are bound to hope about you and wait for you to come, like we did Uquar. They’ve got even more Jamies in the Khan clan than they have Elsas now, and you should hear the stories they’re telling about you everywhere that Joris has been. And it serves you right! I’m laughing right now at how much I know you hate it! It’s exactly what you deserve, but it’s not doing what you meant to do. You’re too real and we’re not real enough.
That’s why I am writing this down for you to find. This is as much a threat as that decree I sent out. As long as you don’t find me, I shall stay here, in this silliest of silly worlds, and it certainly won’t be getting any realer.
Find me or else!