I was terrified as my new master led me away from the auction platform. He wore the insignia of the Sorcerers' Guild on his samite tunic -- the guild that had grown so powerful of late that more and more crimes were punished by enslavement, with members of the guild getting the right to bid first. Merchants and even nobles were only allowed to buy those slaves that no sorcerer was interested in. And if a sorcerer had bought me, the chances were a hundred to one that I wouldn't be alive and human by the end of the week. Rumor said that sorcerers usually used their slaves to test new spells on, or as human sacrifices to feed power into the more demanding spells; I wouldn't merely be put to work scrubbing floors or dishes.

I debated with myself whether I might live a few days longer if I went along quietly, or if I might earn a quick, relatively painless death if I tried to escape before we reached his house. Obviously, I wouldn't try to escape before we were safely away from the crowd and the guards around the auction house... but I had no chance. The moment we stepped into the street outside, my master chanted a few strange syllables and our surroundings suddenly changed; we were in the vestibule of a luxurious house, surrounded by closed doors whose lintels and jambs were ornately carved and gilt. The sorcerer opened one of them and tugged my chain, pulling me after him through a big room full of upholstered furniture and shelves of curious knick-knacks, many of them doubtless magical, to another, more sparely appointed room with a wide, empty space in the middle, two of its walls lined with shelves -- one containing books and scrolls, another jars and boxes.

My master ordered me to stand in the center of the room, inside a geometric pattern painted inside a circle on the floor, and locked my chain to a ring fixed to the floor. I trembled in anticipation.

He took a pinch of something from one of the jars on the shelf and tossed it into the air toward me. It spread out in a thin cloud all around me, making me cough as he chanted, pacing around the circle. Finally, the cloud dissipated and the chanting stopped. I felt no different. Had his spell failed, or were its effects unobvious?

"That spell should make it impossible for you to disobey me," he said. "Step out of the circle."

I did so without hesitation, the chain attached to my collar unlocking itself and trailing behind me.

"Follow me." He led me back through the furniture-filled room and the vestibule through another door and a corridor, then down two flights of stairs to another corridor and a narrow room with a straw pallet on the floor.

"Rest," he said. "Don't leave this room. I will return when I need you."

I found a chamber-pot, a jug of more or less clean water, and a loaf of bread, finer and tastier than the bread whose theft had led me here. I ate and drank, then laid down on the straw. He hadn't closed the door, but I found I couldn't even consider the idea of leaving.

I slept for a time, ate and drank more, brooded over my fate, relieved myself, slept, and brooded some more. The room and the pallet were more comfortable than many of the alleyways I'd slept in, but terror and anxiety made it at least as bad as my worst nights on the streets since my mother died and the landlord turned me out.

Finally, he returned for me and commanded me to follow him. We returned to the workroom where he had cast the obedience spell on me. He ordered me to stand in the center of the circle and not to leave it, then cast a spell to break the iron collar around my neck. For a fleeting moment, I wondered if he had changed his mind and was freeing me. That was the legal significance of the collar, after all. But then he told me to toss the remains of the collar and chain out of the circle, and strip off my loincloth and toss it out as well. I realized then that he simply needed me naked for his spell, whatever it was, to work.

This spell lasted far longer than the last. He took down a book from the shelf and read long passages aloud. The powders he tossed into the circle clouded the air so opaquely that I couldn't see the sorcerer or the walls of the room, and could barely even hear his chanting. It seemed like half an hour or more passed before I felt anything but slight difficulty breathing.

Then I gradually became aware of something else. Not sight or hearing or any other sense I'd known before, but a more direct perception of something far beyond my experience. Vast tracts of empty space, so wide that the fastest horse could gallop for all of human history and never cross a noticeable fraction of the distance; and scattered at the widest intervals, clusters of suns, still vast distances apart, yet close together compared to the distances between the clusters. And then, as I became more aware of these suns and the spaces around them, I found that many of them were surrounded by rocky or cloudy or watery balls of various sizes. My awareness of the sorcerer's workroom, my laboring lungs, and the sorcerer's chanting faded into the background, but I never lost it entirely; it just seemed uninteresting compared to the suns and the little balls surrounding them.

As I grew more aware of the details of the little balls, perceiving that some of them had living creatures on their surfaces, some of whom seemed to be a lot like humans, judging from their houses and carriages and roads, I realized with a shock that everything I'd ever known -- the city where I'd been born, the rumors of the countryside and other cities and distant countries beyond -- must be a thin layer on the surface of a rocky ball like the ones I'd now become aware of.

And then the distant chanting ceased and the cloud around my body dissipated. I looked around the room with far less than half my attention while I simultaneously considered countless little rocky worlds, each different from my own, only a tiny fraction similar enough to my own for me to understand much of what I perceived. The sorcerer and his workroom were much as I had seen them last, but my own body... my arms and legs and torso had changed. Most of me was deep black, with pinpoints of light that I realized were the suns I had been perceiving -- or rather, whole clusters of them.

"Show me a world like our own," the sorcerer commanded, "with thinking inhabitants who build roads and cities."

I quickly chose one of the worlds I could perceive, and concentrated on it. As I did so, the pinpoints of light scatted across the "skin" of my body vanished, and my torso was filled with a sphere mottled with ocean and land. Half of its surface was illuminated by the light of a sun that I could perceive with my new sense, but not see within my body.

"Closer," he commanded. "Show me the wealthiest city in that world."

That was a harder command to obey. By what standard would I judge wealth when I barely comprehended the peoples of that world and their ways of life? In various places in that world, the people used different substances for money; in others, they didn't use money at all. I arbitrarily chose one of the bigger cities, one which seemed to have fewer people living in misery than most of the other large cities, and more beautiful, well-built houses and fewer ramshackle hovels than the city I'd grown up in. The skin of my torso became a view of the city from above, my arms and legs showing glimpses of its outlying farms and villages and the rivers that joined in the city to form a larger one that flowed down my left leg.

"Show me the house of the richest man in the city."

The people of that world had three sexes; I thought for a few moments to decide which of them was most like our world's men, then considered the households of the city and which, if any, seemed to have a "man" in charge of them, then which of those showed the most signs of wealth. Finally, I selected one, again more or less arbitrarily. My torso showed the house, the street in front of it, the passing carriages pulled by no manner of beast, but gliding silently along without touching the street.

"Now the interior rooms of the house, one by one."

I showed him the rooms. Six people were eating in one of the rooms, while another, perhaps the kitchen, seemed to have three others working on food preparation. The other rooms were vacant. Finally, as I showed him one of the more richly-furnished rooms, he commanded me to give him a close-in view of one of the shelves. With that, he stepped into the circle and reached into my chest, his hand passing through the apparent surface of my skin without impediment, and lifted a couple of mysterious objects off the shelf, pulling them out. He commanded me to continue showing him the rooms, retrieving a few more objects from the house.

At last, he said: "Return to your cell. Do you know the way?"

"Yes, Master," I said, and started to go. I found that my hands could not handle doors, however. If I tried to twist a doorknob, the knob and part of the door would pass into the other world. If I pulled my hand back quickly enough, the doorknob would return to our world unharmed, but when, on my second attempt, I fumbled around enough to pass my hand entirely through the knob and door, the knob and the cross-section of door surrounding it, cut off from the rest of the door by the boundaries of my hand, dropped to the floor of the house I had been focusing on. In my surprise, I lost my concentration on that house, and my vision expanded to the vast spaces between clusters of suns. I walked right through the door, and perceived that a man-shaped cross-section of the door, thousands of suns high, had appeared in the empty spaces between the clusters of suns.

"Stop!" the sorcerer shouted, and I halted just a couple of paces into the next room. "Let me go before you and open the doors," he said, and did so.

In my cell once more, I realized that I felt no hunger, no thirst, no need to empty my bladder or bowels. Or sleep. I contemplated the world the sorcerer had commanded me to show him, and many others, as well as the processes going on in the hearts of the suns, the gradual formation of new suns from vast clouds of dust, and many other things I have no words to express.

After an unknown time, the sorcerer returned for me. He commanded me to follow him to the workroom, then to show him another house in the same city, one with an extensive library. "One with many more things like this," he said, showing me one of the things he had taken from the first house. After some thought, I found what he wanted, and he looted the shelves, plucking fifty or a hundred books from my chest, then dismissed me to return to my cell.

What seemed like a much longer time passed; learning the language in which those books were written must have taken months, I suppose, though my perception of the passing of time was becoming vaguer. I did not grow bored, having plenty to watch and think about in the uncountably vast number of worlds I could now perceive at once.

Then I became aware of the sound of weeping coming from somewhere near my cell; the high-pitched sound suggested a child or a woman. This touched my heart in a way the suffering of the uncountable sick, poor, and oppressed on the many little ball-worlds had not. I walked out of my cell, realizing as I did so that I no longer felt any need to obey the sorcerer, and searched out the source of the weeping. It came from inside another cell along the corridor, its door wide open. A girl, just a few years younger than me, was sitting on a pallet of straw and sobbing; but as she saw me, she gaped for a moment and then screamed.

"Don't be afraid," I said. "I mean you no harm." I saw the iron collar around her neck. "I see you're a slave. So am I. The sorcerer did this to me."

"Will he do the same to me?" she asked in a hoarse voice.

"I don't know. He hasn't shared his plans."

"He cast a spell on me," she said. "Even though the door is wide open, and my legs work fine, I can't walk out!"

"I know," I said. "He did the same to me when I arrived. But it seems that the spell has worn off with time, or perhaps the other spell he cast, the one that made me like this, gradually wore away the obedience spell."

"Did it hurt?" she asked timidly.

"Not much," I reassured her, though I wasn't sure that the sorcerer would do the same to her as he had done to me. "What were you enslaved for? I stole a loaf of bread."

"They *said* I stole the silver from one of the houses where I was picking up and delivering laundry, but I never did! I think one of the servants there must have stolen it, and they agreed to blame an outsider."

An idea had been growing in the back of my mind. As we spoke, I focused my perceptions on one of the worlds I had been contemplating, one which was inhabited by three different types of people, one of them as much like humans as any of the myriad peoples of the myriad worlds that lay open to my perceptions. They breathed the same kind of air, could digest the same food, could produce the same sounds with their mouths, and even had two sexes. I found a town I had noted where the people were generous and hospitable to strangers, and focused on a street outside a public dining hall.

"What is happening to you?" the girl asked.

"I am helping you escape," I said, stepping slowly into her cell. "You can't leave your cell, but you can do what you like within it, correct?"

"Yes, I suppose so."

"Then crawl into me when I give the word."

"Crawl... *into* you?" she asked doubtfully. I knelt before her and brought my arms to my side.

"You can just stick your hand or arm into me at first, if you prefer."

Hesitantly, she did so. No harm or pain came to her, and gathering her courage, she poked her head into me as well.

"You won't be able to understand their language at first," I said. "But you can learn it; I think they will help you. They don't practice slavery there."

"Thank you," she said, and crawled through me onto the sidewalk in front of the dining hall.

I returned to my cell and watched the girl as she took in her bewildering surroundings, and was approached by friendly strangers, who took her into the dining hall and got her something to eat, trying various languages to communicate with her and then beginning to teach her one of the more widely spoken languages of their world by gestures. By the time the sorcerer came looking for her, she had lodging in a public guest-house and was enrolled in a language class for immigrants and refugees.

The sorcerer came to my cell. "Did you see a girl pass by your door?" he asked. "I don't know how she could have escaped. I commanded her to stay in her cell. Someone must have stolen her."

"I haven't seen her," I said. "I heard weeping and screaming some time ago. I suppose that was her."

"Patrol this corridor until I tell you otherwise," he said. "Walk up and down it, and call out if intruders appear, or if a slave tries to escape."

"Very well, Master," I said. I didn't see any benefit in letting him know I was no longer under an obedience spell. I could contemplate the myriad worlds inside me just as well while pacing up and down the corridor as I could while sitting in my cell.

Some time later, the sorcerer escorted a new slave, a big burly man, into the corridor and put him in the cell the girl had occupied, giving him the same orders -- to stay in the cell until told otherwise and take care of his bodily needs. The new slave was also ordered to scream if someone other than the sorcerer or me appeared, and to resist if someone other than the sorcerer tried to remove him from the cell.

That presented some difficulties, but some hours later, when the new slave was asleep, I went into his cell, focused on the common room of the guest-house in the hospitable city, and laid down on top of the big man. My own boundaries had grown a little vaguer and more amorphous over time -- I no longer had distinct fingers, toes, or genitals -- and I found that I could, with a little effort, stretch myself to his size and a little bigger, so that he could fit through me. I left him lying on the sofa of the common room, to be found a little later by the staff and guests when they rose for the day. I returned to my patrol and watched both him and the girl, as well as uncountable other people on uncountable worlds, until the sorcerer returned.

"What happened to him?" he demanded. "Why did you not call out when he escaped or was rescued?"

"I saw nothing," I lied, continuing to pace up and down the corridor as we talked. "I walked past his cell, and he was lying there asleep; I walked past again, and he was gone. You told me to inform you if intruders appeared or a slave tried to escape, not if he simply vanished."

The sorcerer gave me more explicit instructions, then left, cursing up a storm. Some time later, he returned with a new slave following him, a bony, half-starved boy barely old enough to be legally responsible for a crime.

"Follow me," he ordered us, and led us both to his workroom.

"Show me the city where you showed me the library before," he told me. "Focus on a rich house with nobody home."

I did so, seeing no obvious reason why not. I supposed he would simply reach into me and steal a few things.

But as soon as my "skin" showed a view of the vestibule of the house, the sorcerer said to the boy, "Take this bag and step into him. That's right, just walk into him like he's an open door. Be careful to keep your arms close to your body as you pass through. Fill your bag with small items, things like the pictures in the books I showed you -- not simple cups or statues, no matter how valuable the materials, but things with many intricate parts. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Master. What should I do when the bag is full?"

"Come back here through his body. I will command him to follow you around the house, so you should always see a man-shaped hole in the air nearby, and perhaps you will be able to see me and this room through it. You can report about that when you return."

The boy nodded and said "Yes, Master," starting toward me.

I knew that the boy would not survive that mission. The air of the world the sorcerer had asked me to focus on was not breathable for humans. So the moment he was about to pass through me, I shifted my focus to the world where I had freed the sorcerer's last two slaves, and the guest-house where both of them now lived. The boy, bound by the obedience spell, continued walking through me into the common room of the guest-house. The sorcerer, after a moment of shock, screamed "No, stop!" But it was too late; the boy was through and apparently couldn't hear him. I expanded my focus until I showed him the vast spaces between suns.

"What happened?" he said. "I command you to show me the boy and the house he went into!"

"No," I said, and started forward. He screamed and began chanting a spell, but it had no effect on me, and just before I reached him, he turned and ran through the house. I pursued, allowing him to keep just ahead of me until he had almost reached the front door, and then engulfed him.

He floated helpless in the vast, airless space between the suns, gasping and flailing, screaming soundlessly, and then going still.

For a long time I stood there, silently contemplating the three slaves I had rescued and exiled, and uncountable numbers of other lives on so many worlds. Standing in the vestibule was as comfortable as standing in my cell, or patrolling the corridor. But after a time, I came to a decision. There were others like me, enslaved for no reason but that they were hungry and had taken bread from those who had plenty. Why should they languish in prison only to be experimented on or sacrificed?

I walked through the front door, leaving a man-shaped hole, and set out for the slave auction house.