by Dakota Rusk
Hermione was so deeply upset that for a few moments she could only produce guttural sounds while flicking her hand towards the mirror. Then she summoned up a great store of will and forced herself to enunciate the words:
“Fabia,” she croaked. “In the mirror—I looked into it and saw—Fabia is in the mirror!”
The girls gave each other a fleeting, worried look; then Vipsania stepped over to the mirror and examined it.
“Fabia,” Hermione repeated; “do you see her there—it’s Fabia—”
Vipsania lifted the mirror from the vanity and lowered it to where Hermione crouched in terror.
“Look, mother,” she said. “Look again.”
Hermione reluctantly obeyed…and saw only her own face, ravaged by fright, reflected back at her.
2
I sat up with a gasp; I could hear my heartbeat thudding in my ears.
The foul-smelling vapor still clouded my head; in a panic I waved it away, and once again I could see the room around me—the dark little draperied chamber where the witch had set up the tools of her trade. Beneath me sat the bowl of potions she’d mixed, still giving off a few noxious whiffs.
“Are you quite well, child?” the witch asked, in a way that made it clear she didn’t seriously think anything was wrong with me.
It took me a few moments to catch my breath. “I saw her!” I said. “I saw them all. My mother…it…it was like…”
My lungs gave out again. I pushed the stinking bowl away from me, hoping that would help me breathe easier.
“It was like what, child?" asked the witch. Her tone was soothing, but too much so. She was giving me her full attention, but she might as well have been filing her nails. It was clear that the astonishing experience I’d just had was something completely unremarkable to her.
“It was like I wasn’t just seeing her,” I said, my breath coming easier. “It was almost like…I was her.”
“And so you were,” she replied in a low voice—almost a purr. “Didn’t I explain to you, my dear, that was how it worked?”
“You did, but—”
“Your bond with your mother is one of tremendous spiritual and metaphysical energy,” she told me again. “There is nothing in all of creation more powerful.”
“Not even the Veil?” I asked, as I’d asked her before.
And as before, she scoffed. “The ‘Veil,’ ” she said with a little snort of derision. She wasn’t a very old woman—though it was hard to tell, given all the layers of clothing she wore, skirts and overskirts and blouses and shawls—but when she screwed up her face she looked weathered and ancient. “What is the flimsy barrier between the different iterations of the Earth, compared to the binding power of a mother’s womb? Nothing can dampen or diminish it.”
“So you say, but—”
“There is no ‘but.’ I told you, when first we spoke, that I could prove to you that your home parallel still exists. I could send your consciousness there, through the lines of mystic energy that still tether you to your lady mother.”
“Yes, you did,” I admitted. “And you did send me back to her—only, I ended up inside her! In her head!” I shivered at the memory of it. “Seeing things as she saw them—hearing things as she heard them—even her own private thoughts!”
“Of course you did, child. Where did you think the energy trail between you and your mother would end? Six inches in front of her? No, my dear; it carried you all the way to the place it originated: her sacred interior—the temple of her being. So it was only natural that you saw the things that she saw, felt the things she felt.”
“And in the end,” I said, hating the way my voice quavered but unable to stop it, “she saw me.” I hugged myself, feeling chilled; but it was warm in the room—almost toasty.
The witch smiled; one of her teeth was gold, and it gleamed in the candlelight. “That is usual,” she said. “Your bond to her must be very strong indeed. Was it in a glass that she saw you?”
“Her vanity mirror, yes.”
“And did it frighten her?”
“Yes, it did,” I added, growing a little bolder, as though laying this at the witch’s feet—blaming her. What was her name again? She’d introduced herself when we first met. I struggled to recall it through the last tatters of fog in my brain. “It frightened her very much, Olwen.”
She nodded, so I must have gotten it right. Then she ran the fingers of one hand over the rings and amulets she wore on the other. “I’m sorry for that, precious one. But there is something you can do about it.”
I was instantly alert. “There is?”
“Indeed so. The bond between you, as I said, is permanent and powerful; and now, after your recent intimate connection, it is even more so. Which means if you were to do your best to still your own galloping heartbeat, and to relax your tightened limbs and dispel the anxiety and fright that have beset you—your mother would benefit from the endeavor as well.”
“You mean,” I said, feeling a bit dubious about it, “I can calm her down, by calming myself down?”
“Exactly so. Sit and be quiet for a spell. I’ll leave you, so as not to interfere.”
And with that she parted a curtain of beads and slipped into the adjacent room.
I made a valiant effort to relax, letting my spine bend and my shoulders drop. I drew up my knees and hugged them, and rocked gently in the chair, humming softly to myself. And I did feel some lessening of my delirium.
But my mind was still racing. And it was only now that I realized something huge—and possibly dangerous.
Ever since I’d come out of the trance—the one induced by Olwen’s bowl of vapor-making oils and herbs—I’d spoken about my mother as if she were real…she, and all the rest of my family. In fact I felt that they were real; they still resonated inside me, as though I’d just left them a few moments earlier, with their voices still ringing in my ears, the aromas of their perfumes and pomades still in my nose, the warmth of their bodies still radiating against my skin.
And yet…they couldn’t be real. I knew it for a fact. Parallel 24—that of the Earth from which I’d come, the one in which the still-thriving Roman Empire ruled nearly the entirety of the planet—had been one of the alternate universes that had been wiped from existence by the Terminus Engine…the mechanism that had, paradoxically, made travel between the various parallels possible in the first place.
I’d accepted this. I’d grieved for my family, for my world; I’d made peace with their memory. I’d moved on.
At least I thought I had. But it seemed I hadn’t entirely; why else would I have responded so readily when this woman, Olwen—this self-professed witch—promised to prove otherwise? Why did my heart leap when she told me that my family, my home world, my entire universe, were all still there—and still accessible?
I’d pretended to be skeptical; after all, my closest friends are some of the most respected, most rigorously analytical minds on campus. They’re openly scornful of all this magic business. I’m not nearly in their league, intellectually; but I thought it couldn’t hurt to see what kind of hoax this charlatan would try to put over on me. At worst, I could tell my friends about it and we’d all have a big laugh.
But she’d pulled the rug out from under me. I hadn’t expected anything like this…nothing even close.
I’d been there! In my very own home, where I’d grown up! I’d gone from room to room, seen my sisters, seen the housekeeper, seen my mother’s suitor—seen my mother herself, when she looked into a mirror—just as she’d seen me, a few moments later. And it was all starkly, staggeringly real.
I had gone home—I’d gone back across the Veil, which was supposed to be impossible now that the Terminus Engine had been permanently shut down.
The implications were tremendous. All the six thousand students at Parallel U.—the cream of the crop from more than eighty parallels across the spectrum of the Veil—thought they were trapped here, that there was no way for them to get home.
And I’d just discovered there was.
Of course, it wasn’t really a practicable one; no one would be so hungry to go home that they’d be willing to live permanently inside their mother’s head—assuming that condition even could be permanent (and the way the spell depended on breathing vapors made this seem highly unlikely). But it was proof that the Veil could be pierced by other means than the Terminus Engine, and that the parallels everyone thought had been erased, weren’t erased at all.
That was Olwen’s bargain with me, it turned out. When I’d sufficiently recovered, I got up and went to the next room, where I found her curled up with a book and a cat, her bare feet tucked up onto the sofa cushion with the rest of her. And when I tried to pay her for her services, she waved my money away.
“There is no charge to you, child,” she said with a beguiling grin. “For you, I ask only that you tell your friends what you have seen. Let them know that they shouldn’t disdain or dispute things they don’t understand. Give them the gift of one drop of humility, and see what that nourishes in them. And then, when they are ready,” she added, smiling even more widely, “send them to me.”
I left, and made my way across campus to my dorm. There were the usual noisy demonstrations on the commons—students with megaphones, standing on milk crates and shouting about the upcoming referendum—and even a fistfight or two; but I scarcely noticed them. Such things had become all too familiar a part of campus life since the end of freshman year. And besides, I was too preoccupied with my dilemma: I’d made a bargain with a witch, and she’d named her price.
But it was a price I couldn’t pay.
I couldn’t tell my friends what I’d experienced. I couldn’t. I knew exactly what they’d say.
“You didn’t cross the Veil,” they’d insist. “There’s no such thing as ‘mystic maternal energy,’ and even if there were, it wouldn’t be powerful enough to broach the barrier between the parallels. All that woman did was subject you to a very vivid hallucinogen. Everything you saw, heard, smelled, and touched was all in your head.”
But it seemed so real, I’d insist.
“Of course it seemed real,” they’d reply. “That’s what hallucinations do. That’s the whole point of them.”
But it was my exact house, I’d say; exactly where I grew up, down to the scratches on the window sills; every detail of the vision perfect, even the little bouncing way my sister Vipsania walks when she gets angry.
“All from your memories,” would be the reply. “And admit it: wasn’t it a rather simplified version of the real thing? I mean, your sisters aren’t quite that vapid and selfish, are they? The way they acted in this little scenario you describe, they’re like cartoon evil stepsisters or something.”
And that was largely true; I would have to admit it.
“And the whole exchange between your mother and her gentleman friend: didn’t that strike you as being excessively…well, courtly? It doesn’t sound like there was any romantic feeling between them at all; just this very mannered politeness. Is that really the way two middle-aged adults who are in love act, in your parallel? Because it’s not in ours. In fact, what it sounds like is the way any of us would like to imagine our mother’s love life: basically nonexistent.”
And that sounded true as well.
“Also, there’s the way everything seemed to revolve around you.” Someone was bound to point that out.
And I’d say, But, it didn’t. Mother only thought things would be different if I were there, and that’s fair, because they would. And that’s all she thought. There was no running on about all my championships, or my getting into Parallel U., or anything like that.
“No,” my friends would reply, “because of your natural modesty. Of course a scene from your imagination wouldn’t be a big celebration of your accomplishments. But your natural pride wouldn’t let them be reduced to nothing, either…and the fact is, this dream-world you imagined seems to hinge on your not being there, and the uncertainty of whether you will or won’t ever come back.”
Then I’d make my final argument: if the whole thing was just a hallucination fed by my imagination, why did I end up seeing it all from my mother’s point of view? Why didn’t I see it from my own? I had never, in my wildest dreams, put myself in my mother’s place; it didn’t make sense that I would do it now.
Unless, of course, it was because I really had been in my mother’s place—propelled there by a spell cast by a bona fide witch.
I left the commons and started up the walk towards Dawkins Hall, and made it all the way to the entrance without having imagined what their response would be to that.
I felt myself brighten a little; maybe I could tell my friends about the experience. If there was even one small aspect of it that they couldn’t explain away, they’d have to consider—objectively, of course; rationally; scientifically—that the whole thing might have some validity.
But as I passed through the vestibule into the front hall, I sighed in defeat. Because I realized, even if I managed to get my friends to that point, it would still be useless: because they’d have one final argument as well, and it would be a big one.
“Ultimately,” they’d say, “it’s irrelevant whether magic is real or not, or whether this witch actually has the power to send your consciousness to a different parallel—because we don’t need a magical solution to piercing the Veil. We already have a solution, and it’s better, faster, safer, and more portable than the awkward, clumsy, lethal Terminus Engine."
And so we did. Our friend Eddie Mason, the boy genius who’d befriended us during freshman year, had invented it. It was a ridiculously simple-looking device that he wore strapped to his wrist. He called it “The Hopper,” because when he activated it, he could basically jump from one parallel universe to another, like leaping across stepping stones in a stream.
So a magical means of piercing the Veil—even if it did exist—wasn’t necessary. All the university had to do was adapt Eddie’s Hopper technology, and everyone could go home again.
And when my friends pointed this out, I’d give in. Of course I would. They were all smarter than I was, sharper, brilliant in ways I couldn’t even begin to grasp.
And I wouldn’t have the heart to hit them with the one final counter-argument that would make their case tumble like a house of cards.
Which was that we hadn’t seen Eddie Mason in almost five months.
Nor did we have any idea where he was; it could be in any of the dozens of parallels already mapped—all of which were now completely beyond our reach.
And even worse, we couldn’t know for a fact that we’d ever see him again.I found my friends all gathered together when I entered my room, which wasn’t unusual these days. We’d become a tight-knit little cluster after all our freshman adventures together.
They looked up as I came in, and I greeted them with what I hoped was a reassuring smile. I really did love them quite a lot. Merri Terryl and I were more like sisters than roommates; she was a small, plucky girl from a parallel where Earth had been blasted by a nuclear war—because of which she had a screwed-up magnetic field and had to wear a clunky damper bracelet to keep from shorting out electronics at close range. Then there was Darius m-1119, the stunningly beautiful boy from across the hall; he was from a parallel where the only human beings left were mechanisms, not organisms—artificially intelligent androids. And finally there was Gerrid Selk, the gaunt, sallow boy from a parallel where humankind had developed into a nocturnal species, and whose pallor and long canine teeth made everyone who didn’t know him call him “the vampire” (which he just flat-out hated).
“Where’ve you been?” Merri asked—though without any real suspicion. “We missed you at breakfast. Did you get anything to eat?”
I hadn’t, and I was, I now realized, ravenously hungry; but I pretended not to be, so as not to draw attention to myself. “I was feeling restless,” I lied, dropping my bag onto my bed and going to join them in the little corner lounge,
where they were hanging out on folding chairs and beanbags. “I went to the gym early and had a workout.”
“Anything to report?” Darius asked. “Rumors from the commons, or new developments on the witches?”
I smiled as I popped open a can of fizzy water.
“Nope,” I said, prior to taking a sip. “Not one single thing.”
3
I understood why Olwen wanted me to persuade my friends of the validity of magic. We were highly influential among the other students, and even among the faculty. After all, we were the ones who, late in freshman year, discovered that the Terminus Engine was causing the parallels to blink out of existence; and we were the ones who then stormed in and shut down the Engine at the risk of our lives (in fact, at the sacrifice of one of them).
So we were heroes—“superheroes,” Eddie had called us just before he disappeared. And the new administration had used us many times to help calm the unrest on campus.
There was plenty of unrest to go around. With the Terminus Engine now disabled and everyone cut off from their home parallels, all kinds of problems surfaced, and not just emotional and psychological ones. For one thing, there could no longer be any financial exchanges between the university and the various families of the students. A fund had hastily been set up during freshman year to accommodate students whose parallels had gone “offline;” but now they were all offline, and the fund couldn’t support the increased demand. Put simply, every student on campus was soon running out of money…my friends and I included.
So the United Nations task force that had been authorized to oversee the university during this period made the decision to seize certain assets of the Terminus Institute (the bad guys who had built and then run the Engine, and kept it running even after they learned it was lethal), and liquidated those assets to finance the maintenance of the student body. This made the Institute very, very angry; and while they were temporarily helpless to do anything about it—the eyes of the world were now on them, after all—they still made some snarling protests that sounded pretty similar to threats. It really does amaze me how people who are ridiculously, obscenely rich—richer than they can possibly even comprehend, much less enjoy—will act like cornered animals when you touch even a little bit of what they’ve amassed. It’s a kind of sickness, a terrible disease of the soul, that’s bound to come back and threaten us again.
