Free Further: Beyond the Threshold by Chris Roberson Page A

thinking to go unchecked, and garnered a Hugo Award for best novel while at the same time earning him few friends among the civic and religious leaders of the country. In the end, the harassment that ensued worsened to the point where he found it easier to leave the country entirely, joining the expatriate community in Bangalore, his wife and young son in tow.
    As I was growing up, my father often spoke of his hope that humanity might one day outgrow the need for religion entirely. My mother, a nonpracticing Hindu, saw value in the cultural traditions of her ancestors, and the disagreement led to more than a few vociferous discussions at family meals. That my mother had relatives in the state of Rajasthan who still had not forgiven her for marrying out of caste—a system that had been forever abolished a generation before, largely due to the efforts of my maternal grandfather—and with a Black American, no less, only served to strengthen my father’s argument.
    This Demiurgist Doctrine, at least, sounded as though it was based in empirical evidence, but I couldn’t help but wonder.
    “Are many of your people religious?” I asked.
    The silver eagle shook its head. “There are few, if any, ‘religions’ in the Entelechy, as the term has historically been used. However, there are adherents to hypotheses that have not, or even cannot, be experimentally proven, commonly referred to as ‘doctrines.’ In addition to the Demiurgists, there is the Ordinator Doctrine, which holds that the universe is a computational mechanism, and the related Recursive Doctrine, which contends that all of existence is an historical emulation of some earlier reality. There are any number of such non-falsifiable hypotheses currently in vogue, and a greater number which have passed in and out of fashion in recent years.”
    “So none of the religions of my era have survived, then?”
    “That would not be a completely accurate statement, sir. But those that have survived have evolved into forms their former adherents likely would not recognize.”
    I glanced around me as the slidewalk carried us through pleasure gardens and towering castles of glass, all constructed of matter that once had been the dirt beneath my feet.
    “I can’t say that I’d blame them.”

FIFTEEN

    The escort maneuvered us off the slidewalks and back to the grand structure called the Central Axis, the hub of the threshold network of wormholes. From there, reaching the terraformed world of Cronos was a journey of no more than a quarter of an hour as we transited thresholds one after another, each time stepping through the towering metal arch from one axis to another, each smaller and farther from the central hub than the last. Finally, our third transit carried us to the terminus on Cronos itself, and I found myself standing on the surface of another Earth.
    Had I not known better, I would have thought I stood in the center of some major metropolitan city in the western hemisphere, sometime in the early 21C, pre-Impact. But a moment’s examination began to reveal the anachronisms, some subtle and some far less so. Skyscrapers rose on all sides of a broad plaza, in the center of which stood the threshold. A few hundred meters away a crowd milled, though little pockets drifted here and there in all directions. Horse-drawn carriages and early 20C roadsters shared the roadways with bicyclers and hovercrafts, and overhead, a zeppelin drifted, tethered to a spire atop a nearby tower, while biplanes and scramjets cut across the sky at varying speeds.
    The crowd seemed not yet to have noticed our arrival, though one or two heads began to turn our way. I felt a twisting in my stomach, a familiar fight-or-flight reflex, and had to resist the temptation to flee back through the threshold.
    Having been trained in Interdiction Negotiation, I’ve had experience in sizing up the tactical situation of any circumstance and using available resources to my advantage, and I’ve been in