And same question for me—how did I know I could trust her?
Because when you thought about it, I had absolutely no idea where I was. Not just where in the world but in what world. The place looked a lot like Earth, but it could be completely different. There might be creatures on it I had never heard of or seen. The girl looked human, but how did I know she didn’t eat her own kind? Maybe she was leading me back to her people, who were going to throw a big party in my honor and then roast me alive.
At least the dog was on my side. He stayed so close I could feel his breath against my bare leg as I hurried down the trail, trying not to jam my bare feet against every rock and twig.
At one point the girl got a little too far ahead of me. I was afraid I’d lost her.
“Audie?” I called out, wondering if it was possible she had my same name.
She didn’t, but she did come back. And she understood.
“Halli,” she said, pointing to herself. “I’m Halli.”
I introduced myself and we both shook hands.
Which, considering the science of the whole thing, might be the weirdest thing I’ve ever done.
4
Halli led me into a small clearing. And there it was: a normal-looking campsite with a tent and a campfire and all that. Not that I’ve ever camped, but it sure looked like any picture of it I’ve ever seen. No human skulls lying around, no scraps of flesh where maybe the dog had tricked someone else into thinking he was friendly, then ripped the intruder to shreds.
Halli opened the door to her tent and dove in. She backed out again holding an armful of clothes. “Here,” she said, “put these on. Right away.”
Warm black pants, fuzzy red jacket, thick gray socks. All in my size, of course.
While I pulled on her extra clothes, Halli hefted over an armful of logs and then coaxed her campfire back to blazing.
“There,” she said, sitting down across from me and stretching her fingers over the flames. “Warm yet?”
“Almost.” The dog was certainly doing his part. As soon as I finished dressing, he lay down as close as he possibly could to me, rested his chin on my lap, then closed his eyes and sighed deeply.
Halli shook her head. “He doesn’t do that with anyone except me.” She looked me straight in the eye. “But I guess it’s obvious, isn’t it?”
“I think so,” I answered.
“Then would you explain to me how?” she asked. “And who—or whatever—you are?”
“I’ll try in a second,” I said. “But can you tell me something first? Is this . . . Earth?”
“Yes.” But from the look on her face she obviously thought the question was strange.
“Where are we? I mean, specifically, on Earth.”
“It’s called Colorado.”
“We have Colorado, too,” I said excitedly. “I mean, I’ve never been there, but we have it.”
“Who’s ‘we’? What exactly are you?”
It was kind of a rude question to keep asking, but I couldn’t blame her. “I’m just a girl,” I said. “Like you. We have Earth, too. I think it’s just . . . a different one.”
She started to say something, but I cut her off.
“I promise I’ll try to explain in a minute, but can you just tell me what the date is? Please?” I wanted to make sure I hadn’t gone backward or leapt forward somewhere in time—because that would open up a whole new set of possibilities. And a whole other set of problems. Not that this set was going to be easy.
September 22nd. Same date and year as when I’d left this morning.
I let out a breath. My brain was going a billion miles a minute. But it all boiled down to this: Professor Hawkins was right. Parallel universes really do exist. And I’d found one. Same Earth, same time, same identical features.
Except for one thing.
“But you’re not Audie Masters,” I said.
“No, I’m Halli Markham. And now it’s your turn,” she said. “Tell me everything you know.”
5
“There are two theories,” I began. “Well, really three. Well, really there are lots of theories—” I stopped myself. Keep it simple.
Lydia always makes snoring sounds whenever I talk about too much about science, so I’ve learned to keep it short. People don’t have the patience for it the way I do.
What I needed was a visual aid.
I untangled myself from the dog, stood up and found a stick. Red immediately got up, too, tail wagging, obviously thrilled I was going to throw the stick for him. Instead I used it to draw two lines in the dirt.
“Let’s say this line is my universe,” I began. “Everything in the universe—all the stars and planets and everything on them—humans and everything else—we’re all confined to this one membrane. A three-dimensional membrane—they call it a ‘three-brane.’” I stopped for a moment. “Is this . . . too much?”
“No,” Halli said. “Go on.”
I pointed to the second line. “Over here is your three-brane. Your whole universe.”
I dug both lines a little deeper. “Usually we just exist side-by-side—maybe even a fraction of a millimeter apart—but we never actually touch. We never communicate or even know the other one exists. Then every trillion years or so, the membranes collide and they blow each other up and we start the whole cycle again.”
“Is that true?” Halli said. “I’ve never heard anything like that.”
“Well, right now it’s just a theory. It’s called cyclic cosmology. There’s a lot of math and physics to support it, but so far nobody’s really been able to prove it.”
Until now, I thought. I was going to be the youngest Nobel prize winner for physics ever.
I drew five more lines in the dirt. “There are other scientists who say there are multiple universes, not just two. It’s the multiverse theory—a different universe for every possibility. So maybe in Universe X your parents meet and have you, but in Universe Y they meet and hate each other and marry other people and have Child Z, not you. Does that make sense?”
“I think so,” Halli said.
“Okay, so back to our original two universes and their membranes. Whether there are two parallel universes or five million, the fact is none of us knows the other ones exist. We might guess they’re out there, but we can’t prove it. We can’t communicate with each other.”
“Until today,” Halli said.
“Exactly.” I was happy she caught on so quickly. I figured she was ready for the next step.
I drew some squiggly lines in the dirt. “And that’s where string theory comes in.”
Halli blew out a breath. “I’m going to need some tea for this.”
I’d done it again—lost my audience. At least Halli hadn’t made snoring sounds yet.
“Sorry, I’m not very good at explaining—”
“No, you’re great,” Halli said. “It’s just a lot to take in. Without tea.” She smiled encouragingly. “But this is really helping. Don’t stop.”
It was amazing how good that made me feel. Even though technically it might look like it was me telling myself—like I was giving myself a pep talk in the mirror.
But this wasn’t a mirror and she wasn’t me. Halli was a different entity. We might be the same, but we weren’t the same.
Maybe I needed some tea, too.
She quickly brewed some up, first crushing some seeds into the bottom of her cookpot, then adding some sort of ivory-colored liquid on top. The steam from it smelled rich and spicy—something like cinnamon, but not quite.
She poured half of it into a mug for me and the rest into a bowl for herself. Which made sense, I thought, since she wasn’t really expecting company and wouldn’t have brought along a second mug.
But then I did something really stupid. I waited until Halli looked away for a moment, then quickly wiped off the rim of the mug with my sleeve. And instantly felt ridiculous. Because if she had any cooties, weren’t they my genetic cooties, too? We could probably share
the same toothbrush and it wouldn’t hurt me. Not that I ever would.
“Okay, so string theory,” I said when she’d settled back down again. I gave her the shortest version I could.
At the end of it she pulled her sweater away from her shoulder. “Strings?”
“Strings,” I confirmed.
Halli pointed at Red. “Different strings?”
“Well, same strings, just like atoms are all the same, but let’s just say they’re vibrating differently to make up the particles that make him.”
Halli considered that a moment, then nodded. She pointed at one of the pines. “Tree strings?”
“Sure,” I said, just to keep it simple. “We can call them that.”
“Fine,” Halli said, “go on.”
The last piece was the meditation CD. And how I’ve been trying to vibrate differently all these months.
“I thought maybe I could do it if I just concentrated really hard.”
“Or maybe if you didn’t concentrate at all,” Halli said. “That’s what I try to do when I meditate—just completely empty my mind.”
“Sure. Okay.” I was too into my own story at that moment to follow up on what she’d said, but I was going to find out more soon enough.
“So I had this idea,” I said, “that in the same way there are gravitational and electromagnetic and other kinds of fields, maybe there’s also a vibrational field that no one’s ever discovered. Maybe they just haven’t been looking for it. And I thought maybe that could be the way to bridge the gap between the two universes.”
I drew a short line in the dirt connecting two of the longer ones. “If I could vibrate past the field, across one three-brane into the other, maybe I could contact that other universe. Your universe. And this morning it finally worked.”
Halli had lifted the bowl to her mouth, but now she paused mid-sip. “Oh.” And then she smiled mysteriously.
“What?” I said.
“Now I understand,” she said. “It happened because of me.”
“What? No—” Hadn’t she been listening?
“I’m saying it wasn’t just you,” Halli went on. “It had to be me, too.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“How long did you say you’ve been trying to do this?” she asked. “Six months?”
“Right.”
“And it never worked.”
“I was always too distracted,” I said. “I’m not good at settling down and just meditating.”
“Well, I am,” Halli said. “I’m actually quite good at it. I’ve been doing it since I was little. But do you know when I haven’t been doing it? These past six months. Not until today.”
She sipped her tea and studied me over the steam. Like she was waiting to see the moment when I finally got it.
And then I did.
“You think it’s two-way,” I said. “Sender and receiver.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been calling out, but there was no one listening at the right frequency—until this morning.”
“Right,” Halli said.
“And no one else was ever going to answer because she wasn’t you. She wasn’t like me. It had to be you because our brains are made the same.”
Halli smiled. “And look how smart we must be.”
I closed my eyes. My head was feeling spinny.
“Why today?” I asked her. “Why today and not the last six months? If I’ve been calling and calling to you, why haven’t you answered?”
Halli paused. She set down her bowl. I could tell she was stalling.
Finally she looked me in the eye. “It’s because I haven’t wanted to meditate for the whole past year. My grandmother died a year ago today. She’s the one who taught me to do it, so I guess it’s been my own personal protest not to meditate anymore. I thought it would be too intense—I’d be too sad. So I just gave it up.
“But yesterday I thought I should honor her. So I came up here to camp, and this morning went out on that cliff to meditate. And I called to my grandmother and asked her to come to me.
“But then you showed up instead.”
6
Before I could ask any of the obvious questions, like, Why would your grandmother come if she was dead? Do you believe in ghosts? Do the dead come back to life here?—Halli saved me the trouble and went ahead with her own explanation.
“Do you know my grandmother?” she asked. “Virginia Markham. Ginny.”
So that’s who Halli had been asking about when I first showed up.
It seemed like I should know her grandmother. If Halli and I were exact genetic duplicates of each other, each living in our own universes, then it made sense that our parents and grandparents and every other relative down the line should also be exactly the same. Like I told Halli, all it would take was one person in our ancestry deciding no, he or she would rather go out with this person instead of that one, and the whole gene pool would have been different, meaning Halli or I would never have been born.
So I had to assume that Halli and I had the same grandmother. I also had to assume, based on the fact that Halli was called Halli instead of Audie, that her grandmother would have a different name, too.
“Do you have a picture of her?” I asked.
Halli ducked inside her tent and emerged with a rolled up scroll-looking thing. She unfurled it and laid it flat on her lap. It turned out to be a kind of computer-like screen about the size of a sheet of paper, and practically as thin. Halli pressed the surface of it in a couple of places, then passed it to me.
The face looking up at me was definitely my grandmother’s. My mother’s mother, to be exact. A sweet old lady my mom and I both affectionately refer to as “it’s for you” whenever we see her number on Caller ID, because conversations with her can definitely be . . . less than fun. My grandmother doesn’t really approve of how we run our lives. We’re too poor for her compared to my Uncle Mike and his family, and my grandmother just can’t help bringing it up all the time.
“Did your father send his child support this month?”
“Mom, it’s for you . . .”
“Is that her?” Halli asked once I’d looked at the screen.
“Yes, but her name’s Marion Fletcher over . . . ” I gestured vaguely to my left. “. . .there.”
“But you’re sure they’re the same.”
“Yes,” I said.
A beeping sound came from the screen. The photo on it disappeared, and in its place came a swirl of lights. They lifted off the screen and twisted in the air right above it.
Halli groaned. “I shouldn’t have turned it on.”
“What’s—”
But Halli held her finger to her lips and motioned for me to get inside her tent.
A voice came from the swirl of lights. “Halli? Where are you?”
I knew that voice. It was my mother’s.
As soon as I was safely in the tent, peeking around the edge of the flap, Halli pressed something on her screen.
“What,” she asked dully.
Suddenly a head appeared. My mother’s head. Also her shoulders and a little of her upper torso. Maybe at three-quarters their regular size, but otherwise looking fully real in three-dimensional color. It looked like she was there in person—or at least her upper body was. She hovered over the top of Halli’s screen, talking to her as if they were in the same room.
“We were worried,” my mother—technically, Halli’s mother—said.
“Why?” Halli asked. “I’m sure my dot moved.”
“You shouldn’t be out there alone,” her mother said.
“I’m not alone—”
Halli glanced my way. I ducked back inside the tent. I thought I was supposed to be a secret.
“—I’m with Red,” Halli finished. Then she slowly started edging toward the tent.
She knelt down in front of the door, held the screen high over her head, then coughed. The screen jiggled and the three-dimensional image of my mother lost focus�
��sort of like bad TV reception. And in that moment, Halli passed the screen to me.
“No!” I whispered.
“Yes,” Halli mouthed.
She quickly skittered away from the tent. I was alone with just her mother.
“Uh. . .hi,” I said as soon as her face came back. I couldn’t resist poking my finger through her cheek—she just looked so real. But of course my finger passed right through. It was just a hologram.
“Red, relax! It’s just a holo,” Halli had said when I first showed up. Now I understood. No wonder she was so confused when that rock she threw at me bounced off.
“. . .traveling with your dog isn’t the same as being with other people,” Halli’s mother was saying. “Your father and I worry about you.”
When I didn’t answer right away, she said, “Halli, are you listening?”
“Oh, sorry, Mom. Go ahead.”
“Mom?” She seemed a little flustered by that. Halli shook her head at me. Her mother cleared her throat and continued.
Meanwhile I stared at her face.
That woman was definitely my mother. And definitely not.
She looked older. More tired. Heavier, too. Not healthy and energetic-looking like my mother. Just generally puffy and worn out and old.
“Are you listening?” she asked again.
“Yes,” I said. “Sorry. How are you?”
Halli waved for my attention and shook her head again. Apparently I wasn’t handling this right.
Her mother seemed confused by my question, too. “I’m. . . fine. I wish I didn’t have to track you down all over the world—”
Halli gestured for me to wrap it up.
“Um . . . I have to go,” I told her mother.
“When are you going home?” she asked.
“Uh . . .” I looked to Halli for the answer. She shrugged like she didn’t care.
“I might stay out here a while,” I told her mother.
“Why?” her mother asked. “How much longer?”
Halli came to my aid. She motioned for me to lift the screen high, then she rushed in smoothly and did the coughing thing again. She jiggled the screen and retrieved it from my hands. I took the hint and ducked back into the tent.
Parallelogram Omnibus Edition Page 2
