“Well, they won’t be entirely lost, then,” Delia said.
Dev turned to her and gave her a look that was far less neutral than the earlier one. “That’s not really the point,” he said. “Oh, sure, somebody will take Oz Prime or whatever it winds up being called and make a terrific scenario of it. And I’ll go spend some time there and probably enjoy it a lot. But it won’t be what I know I could have done if I’d just had the time. Sure, sometimes there’s nothing you can do. Life interferes in ways you don’t expect, and you have no choice but to lay something aside and move on. You start realizing that you have only so much time to work with, that you have to prioritize. It’s sad, but . . .”
He straightened up. “You just learn to cope with it,” Dev said. “I’ve got a lot of people expecting me to spend my time to my best advantage so that they get their paychecks on time. But all the same,” and he turned and looked around, so that when Delia’s eyes got used to the dark again she could see that there were hundreds of these little scraps of worlds lying about on that dark plain. “This is what I see behind my eyes, a lot of nights, when I’m trying to get to sleep . . . the worlds I didn’t have time for, and probably won’t have time for later. Hence the name of the Microcosm. Yeah,” he said, catching Delia’s look of surprise, “the rumor’s true. This is my Microcosm, the place I keep visiting even though I have a hundred and twenty-one ‘real’ universes of my own to play with already.” He looked around him with an expression of strange sorrow.
“Does anyone else know about this?” Delia said. “Your staff?”
Dev didn’t answer instantly. He looked distracted, though apparently not due to anything the Little Bird had told him—it had put its head under its luminous wing and was apparently asleep. “I think a couple of them suspect,” he said. “Maybe they even suspect what’s here. But those people haven’t pressed the point either.” She looked at Dev in the dimness and got a glimpse of an unusually grim smile. “What profits it a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?”
Delia didn’t say anything. It was always possible that this was more of what she’d earlier started to refer to as the Devvier-Than-Thou act, pure PR meant to emphasize how Nice he was. Yet at the same time, he’d had a point before, little as Delia liked to admit it. If he genuinely did feel sad about the lost opportunities in his life—which realistically was still possible, eighth richest man in the world or not—no, wait, he was seventh now, wasn’t he—who would believe him if he told them? I could be doing him a disservice.
But that’s why I came here to begin with. Who am I fooling?
“Anyway,” Dev said, “this was a whim; I haven’t had time to even set foot in here for weeks. Let’s move on. System management?”
“Here, Dev,” said the control voice out of the air around them.
“Open us a gate, please.”
“What world, Dev?”
“Tangaran. With an abstention for me and my guest, please.”
“Done, Dev. Please enter.”
The lintels of a stone trilithon materialized first, and then the silver mist between them. It swirled and vanished to reveal a bright morning sky, though the color of it was strange—more greenish than anything else. In the distance under that sky, green fields spread to the horizon.
“You’ll have fun with this one,” Dev said, and stepped through. Delia went after him and found herself—
—in the midst of a pitched battle. All around them, hulking hairy apelike creatures in rivet-studded leather breastplates were bashing on more apelike creatures in metal helmets and battered armor. As one pair of the battling creatures plunged right at her and Dev, Delia couldn’t help herself: she let out a little shriek and ducked away—
Not that it mattered, because the creatures passed right through her and Dev as if they were dreams or ghosts. Furious at herself, Delia straightened up and looked around the battlefield, where hundreds and hundreds more of the ape creatures were chasing each other across the trampled and bloodied landscape in small and large bands. “Just so you know,” Dev said, “no one here cares about how you reacted, because Tangaran is a Microcosm where people come