by Dakota Rusk
“I would like to thank Ms. Terryl for her cautionary words this morning,” Jocasta said. “Such passion and integrity in one so young are very moving and inspirational. I am afraid that I, old and weathered as I am by life’s cares and disappointments”—she had never looked more radiantly youthful—“cannot speak to you on such terms. That is many, many years behind me.
“And so,” she continued, smiling brightly as she quarter-turned her head to where her delegation sat just below the platform, “I have asked someone else to speak on our behalf: a new arrival on campus, just this morning—but someone many of you may know, or remember…for she was enrolled here herself, for a time, last year.”
“What?” muttered Gerrid in a shocked, flat tone.
“Wait a minute,” said Darius. “What is she—”
But before he could finish the question, the answer came. Jocasta extended her arm, beckoning someone from the delegation to mount the platform, and said, “Please welcome my trusted friend, and your fellow student, Rowella Ravencroft.”
10
“Is that really her?” I asked. I had no way of knowing; I hadn’t met Rowella during her brief enrollment the previous year.
Gerrid nodded; and on my other side, Darius confirmed it by whispering, “Yes. It’s her. How can she possibly be here?”
I looked harder at the girl who mounted the platform and approached the podium. She was short, plumpish, and with a mop of very curly red—almost vermilion—hair. Her skin was luminous and her eyes sparkled.
She smiled at the crowd—which was utterly still; everyone else must be as thunderstruck as we were. All you could hear was the twittering of birds, coming out into the sunlight and happily calling out to each other now that the rain had stopped.
“Good morning,” she said; her voice was lilting. “It feels so odd to be back here at Parallel U.! I never thought I’d see it again. And it’s wonderful to see my old roommate, Merri Terryl, once more, and hear her speak. It reminds me of how tremendously principled and…well, smart she always was. She could always talk rings around anybody.”
There was a splash of awkward laughter; I looked to where Merri was seated, just a few steps behind. Her face was blank with what I presumed was shock.
“Seriously,” Rowella continued, “we really did share a room at the beginning of freshman year. And there were so many times Merri would do her best to try to get me to understand even the most basic thing about physics and astronomy and chemistry and, well, anything. But…” With one hand she knocked on her head, while with the other she rapped on the podium—so it appeared the resultant wooden sound came from her skull. “Thick as a plank,” she said, to more general laughter. “I couldn’t grasp a thing. It all sounded like the most unintelligible mumbo-jumbo. Eventually I just gave up and went home. I knew I didn’t belong here, and didn’t think I’d ever come back.
“And yet,” she continued—and there was a tremendous energy to the silence that filled the subsequent pause; everyone practically tilted forward in anticipation of her next words—“here I am, on the commons once more. And while I understand Merri has had quite a career of jumping from one parallel to another, she’s now not able to do what I’ve just done: which is kiss my mother goodbye after breakfast in my home parallel, and be here to speak to you in yours, in time for lunch.”
Beside me, Gerrid started to writhe in anxiety. He didn’t like hearing anyone speak slightingly of Merri. I put my hand on his arm to calm him; I was afraid if I didn’t, he’d end up leaping to his feet and—and I don’t even know what.
“There’s a reason I was able to do that,” Rowella continued, “where none of you at present can. It’s because I walk the way of magic, which many of you scorn. And I honestly don’t understand why; can you really mean to disdain magic? Can you really say you want to live your whole life without it? Without that sense of possibility—of openness to fate—that comes with accepting that there are limits to understanding, but no limits to human joy?
“I just mentioned my mother. When I kissed her goodbye a few hours ago, I felt profound changes: a physical lightness combined with a heaviness of heart…a quickening of my pulse and a deep stillness—a contentment that warmed me to my very core. And I’m sure that there are those among you who can explain to me why those things happened—can tell me that I’ve been conditioned to associate my mother with sustenance and protection, so that her presence triggers chemical changes in my brain—perhaps a lessening of anxiety, a relaxation of my alertness to the world around me, born out of my experience that when I’m next to her, I’ve entered a safe sphere. I’m sure that everything I felt when I kissed my mother can be charted and diagrammed and quantified and graphed. But what’s missing from all that analysis is that what I felt—what every child feels for its mother—is magic.
“There’s a saying in my parallel that once you understand magic, it stops being magic. That’s why we’re grateful merely to wield it, to take the forces and currents that already exist in the natural world around us and shape and funnel and direct them, to the extent we can, to achieve the aims we desire. To do more is self-defeating; when you dissect an animal, you understand it better…but to what end? In the process of understanding it, you’ve killed it.
“Much has been made of the way we’ve declined to debate our methods and traditions. Some of you—” She paused here, and was it my imagination or did her eyes flicker almost imperceptibly to her left, where Merri sat just behind her? “—have accused us of hiding something, of keeping under wraps some insidious plot to…I don’t even know. Stop flowers from growing, or the sun from shining.
“But the sun won’t ever stop shining. And we will never stop warming ourselves in its light…and using its radiance to spark our fires and illuminate our darkness. The difference is, for you that process is riddled with testing and poking and prodding, and extrapolations that lead to abominations like the Terminus Engine, which ripped apart the Veil and almost consumed all of existence. Whereas for us, the process is, and always will be…magic.
“And the wonderful thing about magic is that on any given day, any given thing is possible. I kissed my mother this morning after breakfast…and here I am telling you about it now. Will you, I wonder, soon be kissing your own mothers, and telling them about this moment, here on the commons, that made it possible? I wonder. And I hope. And I believe.
“Thank you so much for hearing me out. You’ve been very patient, and I’ll get out of your way now and allow you to make what may be the most momentous decision of your lives.”
As she withdrew, it was impossible to tell what effect she’d had; there were pockets of very vocal approval—hoots and howls and wild applause—but others responded in a more muted way, almost as if people were applauding merely to be polite.
But Rowella’s appearance was so sudden, and her words so unexpected—completely ignoring any rebuttal of Merri’s assertions, appealing instead to feeling over thought, ignorance over learning, and submission over achievement—that many people might simply have been too stunned to know what they thought.
And that, I realized, was exactly what Jocasta Foxglove had been counting on. Rowella Ravencroft was the ace in the hole she’d told me about—the trump card she’d held till just this moment, playing it so close to the actual voting that there would be no time for anyone to think too much about it, or put it into any other context than the one Rowella had supplied.
I was deeply unnerved, and I wasn’t alone. When Valery took the podium to close the assembly and direct the attendees to go and cast their ballots, he looked as though he’d had the stuffing knocked out of him. He could barely stand upright and his words seemed to stick in his throat, so that he stuttered and stumbled and sounded almost incoherent. He acted like a man who already knew he had lost.There were four polling places on campus. (There had been talk of voting by phone, but the Parallel 17 delegation had objected to that; possibly they’d heard about the famous hacker Daimon Seed who’d f
ound it so easy to breach the university’s computer system.) Residents of our dorm—Dawkins Hall—was assigned to vote at the administration building, which was sufficiently repaired from its recent fire damage to reopen for use. I hoped we’d see Valery again while we were lined up along the main corridor, but he was keeping himself hidden.
“Maybe he’s pulling some last-minute strings,” I said hopefully, as I waited with my friends for our turn at little row of curtained ballot boxes set up at the end of the main hallway.
Gerrid gave me a scornful look. “ ‘Last-minute strings,’ ” he said, mimicking my upbeat tone. “And what might those be?”
I felt my face burn with embarrassment. “How would I know? But if the witches could have something up their sleeve, why can’t we?”
It was the first reference to Rowella since the assembly had broken up. We’d congratulated Merri on how well she’d done, but had stopped there—as though we were afraid to shatter the fragile mood by mentioning what had happened right after. Though of course it’s what we were all thinking obsessively about, and why we remained so silent all the way across the commons and into Heisenberg Hall.
But now that the subject had been touched on, it all came tumbling out.
“Did you hear the way she carried on?” said Darius—and there was no need to clarify who “she” was. “All that business about mothers. Shamelessly playing the emotion card—hitting everyone stranded here at the point where they’re weakest. And she did it so innocently, like it was all for our own benefit—like she was there to help us clear our poor, science-addled brains.”
As soon as he said this, I realized why we’d all been silent up to now. Rowella’s outrageous appeal to mother-love was of course emotionally manipulative, and obviously entirely calculated. And yet it was also entirely effective. Darius was the only one here who didn’t have a mother; as an android, he’d been built, not born—though he’d hinted that his actual creation involved something called a “gestation matrix,” which he never entirely explained. But I’m guessing something called a gestation matrix was a pretty far cry from any concept that might be called “mother.”
Gerrid, Merri, and I, however, did have mothers, and we felt their loss keenly—me probably more than the others, because I’d been given that wonderful, awful glimpse of her life without me, that might or might not have been real, but was certainly potent enough to lodge the thought of her permanently at the base of my skull. She had been there, like an itch, ever since; I couldn’t get rid of her—I didn’t want to get rid of her—but I couldn’t just ignore her either. She rubbed against my consciousness; and I suspected it was nearly the same for Merri and Gerrid, too—for almost everyone who’d been on the commons this morning.
Which made it so hard for us to criticize Rowella’s remarks, however much they warranted it. For us to attack her invocation of mother-love would be almost like repudiating our mothers.
It’s a mistake to underestimate these witches, I thought; though of course I’d told myself that before. And yet I kept on doing it.
The line moved forward a few inches, and the interval gave Gerrid a chance to change the subject. “What I don’t get,” he said, “is where she’s been all this time.”
I furrowed my brow. “How do you mean?”
“Well, she obviously didn’t just flit across the Veil from Parallel 17. Not by magic, anyway. It’s not possible.”
“So you’re saying she’s been on campus all along? Ever since before the Terminus Engine shut down?”
“She had to be. There’s no other explanation.”
“Nothing is inexplicable, just unexplained,” Darius said, quoting Merri—who had yet to take part in the conversation, and was looking very pale and drawn. “In fact there has to be some other explanation, because there’s no reason for the Parallel 17 delegation to have hidden her on campus that far back. Remember, they can’t have known the university would find itself cut off from all the other parallels. They can’t have foreseen there’d be a turn of events that would give them a chance to take control of the entire campus.”
“We’ve already been through this,” I said. “The delegation itself had to have come from Parallel 17 after the Terminus Engine was switched off. There’s no reason for them to have come before that; like Darius says, they couldn’t have known what was going to happen.”
“Unless they could,” said Gerrid, a bit too defensively. “Maybe they can somehow…well, if not actually see the future, calculate probabilities or something.”
Darius sighed. “That’s sounding disturbingly like magic again. Ouija boards and Tarot cards…”
“You’re missing something,” said Merri, piping up at last. She turned her eyes to meet ours, and we could see the watery despair in them. “Something that pretty much proves she did just come from Parallel 17.”
“What?” I asked.
“She talked about us being roommates. After the assembly she even came over and hugged me and apologized for being so cruel to me; tried to get me to laugh by bringing up some old stories about funny things we experienced together.”
It only took me a moment to see where this was going; then I felt incredibly stupid for not having realized it before.
“But that was the other Merri,” she continued. “I never even met her until just now. And she didn’t know that. She just assumed I was the same girl she’d roomed with. Even though everyone on campus knows that Merri died.”
“So for her not to know it,” Darius said, “she’d really have to have arrived here just this morning.”
“Unless,” I said, my mind spinning wildly, “she was only pretending not to know, because it would make us come to this exact conclusion.”
Darius grimaced. “That’s a pretty convoluted conspiracy.”
“But not an impossible one.”
“We’d better hope it’s not,” said Merri. “Because if she really did cross the Veil just this morning—and if her parallel really has no technology to speak of other than what we call ‘magic’—”
“—then that takes us to a place we really, really don’t want to go,” Gerrid finished for her.
Just then the line moved again, bringing us to the front. Soon each of us was sequestered behind a curtain, casting his or her vote.
I only hesitated a moment before punching a hole next to the word NO.I’d had a number of texts from both Donald and Ntombi, but I ignored them; today, my original friends needed me more. We kept pretty much to ourselves, and after lunch spent the day hanging out by the lake—which the mallards had, sadly, finally abandoned for the winter. I wished I’d been around to see them go. I tried to imagine it, and the idea of something taking flight—on many, many colorful wings—was very cheering given the heavy mood I was in.
On our way back to the dorm we stopped to see Valery, but he wasn’t in his office; the wastebasket by his desk, however, was brimming with empty vodka bottles. This was a pretty clear indication of where he’d gone: home, to sleep through what he apparently thought would be a humiliating defeat. It certainly didn’t look like he’d pulled any “last-minute strings,” even if he’d had them.
As we drew closer to the dorm we found ourselves facing a small mob coming the other way. It was now dusk, and therefore difficult to make out anything but silhouettes, but that was enough to tell me who it was. All term long, Gunther and the Hyena Girls and their pack of rabid followers had been prowling the campus, looking for an excuse to reboot the chaos and turbulence they’d caused during freshman year, as well as in the confusion that briefly reigned after the Terminus Institute was exposed. They’d clearly sensed an opportunity in the arrival of the witches, and had been swaggering around ever since, just waiting for an opening.
I drew myself up and prepared for a confrontation, and felt the others do the same. But we didn’t really have to worry. They knew better than to mix with us now; the whole world was watching the campus in anticipation of the vote count. Besides, Gunther and the girls k
new exactly what we could do in a fight, and despite their superior numbers they weren’t likely to give us the chance. The funny thing is, despite my arena training and Darius’s android super-strength, it was Gerrid they feared the most; after all, he’d actually killed Gunther’s partner-in-crime, Serge, when he was gearing up to assault Merri.
Other Merri, that is; the first Merri. Our Merri hadn’t gone through that, and though she knew intellectually what she owed to Gerrid, she hadn’t been there to feel it; which was one of the causes of the recent disconnect between them. Gerrid had been through hell with Merri, and come out the other side strongly bonded to her. Merri, unfortunately, had only read about it.
She now instinctively started listing to the right, to allow Gunther’s mob to pass; I extended my arm and held her in place. We would not give way to them. Let them be the ones to go around us—either on the right or the left, it didn’t matter. Or let them split up and pass us on either side. We weren’t afraid of them surrounding us, and it was vital that we show them as much.
In fact, that’s what happened; and while the dozen or so surly cretins filed around us, we looked them dead in the eye and kept our pace. We were practically daring them to start something. I, for one, was itching for an excuse to hit somebody. But I knew they’d never take the bait.
Just a few moments after they’d passed us and come together into one group again, Gunther felt sufficiently emboldened to call over his shoulder, “Lot of things going to change around here, once the new people are in charge.”
A dozen retorts shot to my head, but I refused to get into a snark match with him. Instead I turned briefly, caught his eye, and said, with as much menace as I could muster:
“Things are always changing.”
Darius halted long enough to grab my arm and pull me back into stride with him.
“You know the rules,” he said, scolding me as we headed up the walk to the dorm. “We do not engage.”
