Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  The world is funny sometimes.

  “I know what I can see through the window, but I don’t want to make any assumptions right now,” I said. “Where are we?”

  Annie looked me dead in the eye. “Funny,” she said. “We were hoping you’d know.”

  Four

  “The question isn’t whether our children are going to surprise us. Children will always surprise their parents. The question is whether they’re going to surpass us, and I have the sincere hope that the answer will always, always be ‘yes.’”

  —Jane Harrington-Price

  No longer tied to the chair, but as that is really the only improvement, the situation is pretty much as established

  I was unconscious when you brought me here and tied me to this chair,” I said. “If I’d been asleep, I would have been broadcasting my dreams, and Mark would have yelled at me by now. So I know I was out hard. I also know I was outside when I was doing the big math because it was raining.” It had been raining, and I’d thrown up a force bubble to stop us all from getting wet. I remembered making the conscious choice to extend the bubble enough to cover Mark rather than letting him stand outside in the rain—because if I could be the kind of person who kept my allies safe and dry, I should be that kind of person. Even if I still wasn’t entirely sure why he was one of our allies.

  Being surrounded by people whose minds were effectively open books didn’t actually mean I knew everything they were thinking. Artie and Annie’s minds had been like that for years, due to repeated and protracted skin-on-skin contact while we were growing up. Serving as my off-site processing backups had yanked James and Mark into the same level of attunement faster than I would have thought possible, but that didn’t mean I heard everything. I would have broken if I had.

  The best comparison I’ve ever found is to think of a sapient’s mind as if it were a pond. Most ponds are dark and murky, choked with water weeds and mud. Maybe you can see a few frogs, or even a turtle if they’re at the surface, but you can’t see the bottom unless you’re willing to make an effort. Telepathy is making the effort. Once I’m attuned to someone, their pond is clear. I can see through the water all the way to the bottom, and I literally can’t miss something big when it’s right in front of my face—if there’s an alligator in there, I’ll see it. Ditto with a sunken shopping cart. But the little things, fish and tadpoles and mosquito larva, I still have to focus for. I still have to look.

  I always know when I’m near a pond, or a mind. But I won’t get the details unless I go digging. And because I have manners, I usually won’t unless I feel like I have to. So why Mark had gone from abductor to ally was still a mystery to me, but I trusted Annie’s judgment enough not to view it as a threat. It could wait.

  “It stopped raining when you tore a hole in the world and we all got sucked through, so thanks for that,” said Artie. The distrust and mulish dislike radiating off of him were painful if I focused on them, and so I didn’t. I couldn’t put his memories back. They were gone. The closest I could come was sharing my memories with him, and if I did that without his permission, I’d just make things worse for myself.

  “I was trying to save the world,” I said. “I don’t think anyone has ever actually finished that equation and survived with their mind intact before, so there was no way to know what it was going to do.”

  “Well, what it did was pick up the entire campus and drop it into a new dimension,” said Mark. “You know about as much as we do. The sky is orange, there are giant flying bugs everywhere, and there are three suns.”

  “And we can breathe and we didn’t all die of anaphylactic shock as soon as we got here,” said Annie. “So we’re playing more by Doctor Who rules than anything more hard science-y.”

  “The equation was supposed to enable the cuckoos to move on to a new dimension,” I said. “It brain-blasts the one who does the math, and it destroys the world they’re leaving behind, probably by destabilizing the crust of the planet so severely that the chain reaction is like something out of a bad science fiction movie, but the surviving cuckoos get a safe place to land. Biologically, we’re similar enough to humans that it makes sense we’d need a world with compatible biology if we were going to survive on the other side of the rift.”

  “So you think this equation you keep talking about just went shopping for the best possible world to hand over to a bunch of murderous assholes?” asked James.

  “I think it’s math complicated enough to have become vaguely sentient in its own right; it’s a complex organism and a living thing, even if it doesn’t have a physical existence.” Ghosts are real. Artificial intelligence is a major goal for the computer programmers of the world. Math advanced enough to have made the leap on its own isn’t that big of a stretch. “Unfortunately, it’s so big that most of the time it can only exist properly when distributed across all the cuckoos in the world. They bring it together when they want it to wake up and make a queen, and then they let her carry the full weight of it. Whatever that means for her psyche, or for her survival.”

  “How do they get it back when she’s finished?” asked Artie.

  “I don’t know. If they wanted Mark to save my brainless body as a sex doll, presumably they also had a method of harvesting the pieces of the equation from whatever would be left of my mind.” It felt right as I said it. They would dig the equation back out of its hole and slice it into pieces they could survive carrying, bundling each one with the history packet that was passed from parent to child, preserving the exit code in the ancestral memory shared among my entire species. Until they needed to do it all again.

  Preserving the broken queen wasn’t just a matter of keeping her genes. Sure, they might be strong, but with no mind, she wouldn’t be able to pass the memories, meaning any children they incubated inside her would be incomplete by cuckoo standards. But they’d have the equation, and that would preserve it to be redistributed among the population. It was a disturbing, disgusting thought, made all the more so because they’d been planning to do it to me. Things always feel worse when they’re personal.

  “Where is the equation now?” asked Mark, eyes widening and fear rolling off of him as he looked at me. I looked calmly back.

  I suppose it wasn’t such a reach to assume the strange queen you couldn’t remember seeing before might actually be the incarnate world-busting equation your species used to devastate dimensions, but it was still faintly insulting. If the equation had cored me out and taken my body as its new home, I hoped it wouldn’t be able to pass for normal quite so easily.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I blacked out when I finished solving it, and when I woke up, I was here. Maybe it’s loose. Maybe it died when it completed. Can you kill an equation? I guess if it lived in the incomplete pause, then yeah, you can.” A solved problem isn’t living in the same way an unsolved one is. “Anyway, the point remains, the thing was big enough to have opinions. It wanted to live, which means it wanted the cuckoos to live, which means it was motivated to find a world where survival was possible, and if cuckoos can survive somewhere, so can we.”

  “There’s no ‘we,’” said Annie. “You are a cuckoo. Even if the mice agree that you’re secretly family, you’re still a cuckoo.”

  “Okay, fair,” I said. “I don’t get to change my species, no matter how much I wish I could.” And there was that Blue Fairy impulse again. If I’d been able to hold and work an equation complex enough to bridge the gap between worlds, why hadn’t I been able to use that power to turn myself human?

  Math defines and underpins the universe. Without it, nothing would make sense. Nothing would hold together. Physics can’t exist without math. Biology can’t exist without math. Math can do anything. I had had my hands on what was very probably the biggest piece of math in existence, and I’d only used it to do harm.

  The thought was sobering. I stood, finally, and looked down at myself, un
surprised to see that I was wearing nothing but a thin white nightgown. This was already such a nightmare, why shouldn’t it be a nightmare where I didn’t even get to wear a bra? Or shoes?

  “Long story short, math gone, and we are somewhere new. Did any of the other cuckoos survive?”

  “Some of them were already moving when we came to,” said Annie. “They seemed confused, and Mark said he was pretty sure you were the one who’d been doing the ritual, so we grabbed you and skedaddled. If you don’t remember the equation, are you going to be able to get us home?”

  “I think that’s something we work on once we have a slightly better idea of what’s going on here.” The urge to panic was strong, and strangely comforting. For most of my life, I’d been the one who was allowed the luxury of losing my shit completely whenever something threatened me. I’d always had a bigger, tougher cousin nearby to kick the danger in the teeth. Well, for once, I couldn’t count on that. For one thing, here, the biggest danger was either flying bugs that might or might not be friendly, or stray cuckoos. Neither of those was easy to kick in the teeth. For another, they didn’t believe I was theirs to protect anymore.

  Everything about this sucked. “We know there are ways to safely move between dimensions. Grandma Alice does it all the time.”

  “Grandma’s nuts,” said Annie bluntly. “We don’t know whether she was nuts before she started hunting for Grandpa in every dimension she could reach, or whether whatever mechanism she’s using for travel has made her nuts.”

  “She’s not, um, ‘nuts,’” I said uncomfortably. “She doesn’t have any brain damage or mental illness that I’ve ever picked up on. She’s just very badly hurt and very, very sad. She’s been sad and hurt for so long that the way she thinks has changed to make more room for those feelings, and so she doesn’t always seem completely rational to people who don’t think the same way, but she’s not ‘nuts.’”

  “Okay, fine,” said Annie. “Potato, mashed potato. I don’t think we can call her means of travel ‘safe’ is what I’m getting at here.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “Have you tried to call Rose or Mary since we got here?”

  Rose Marshall and Mary Dunlavy are two of my adopted aunts. They’re both dead. . . and have been since long before any modern member of the family was born. Mary was Grandma Alice’s babysitter, and her versions of some of the stories the mice tell about Grandma as a little girl are filthy and hilarious. Because they’re ghosts, they can usually find us anywhere we go, and I’ve never encountered anything that would keep them away, short of a ghost cage or other ward specifically designed to keep them from reaching their family.

  Annie radiated discomfort. “I drew the runes Aunt Rose taught us to use after shouting for Mary didn’t work,” she said.

  “And wasn’t that fun to listen to,” muttered Mark.

  “I have so many knives,” said Annie. “I am the Costco of having knives. You really want to provoke me right now, cuckoo-boy?”

  “I am not a good place to store your knives,” he said. “I don’t know how many times I need to tell you this, but sticking knives in living people just because they say something you don’t like is the reason no one likes you or the rest of your fucked-up family.”

  Annie growled.

  Before she could do anything we’d all regret—but especially Mark, since he was the current target of her ire—James jumped in and said, “Neither of the ghosts came when called. I don’t think they can find us here.”

  “Okay, so we’re genuinely cut off,” I said. Somehow, that wasn’t as frightening as I would have expected it to be. One more thing to worry about later, when we weren’t worried about giant flying insects crashing through the window and eating us all alive. “Annie, you’re the sorceress. Do you know any spells for moving between dimensions?”

  “Okay, one, it’s always ‘sorcerer;’ there’s no gender tag for what James and I both are, just elemental tags; I’m a pyrokinetic, he’s a cryokinetic, which sort of like being a hydrokinetic, except he doesn’t do water.”

  “I freeze the water that’s already in the air,” he said, sounding uncomfortable with his sudden inclusion in this conversation.

  “So if you never call me a ‘sorceress’ again, that would be cool, and second, we’re both still in training. We don’t have a grown sorcerer around to help us learn what we can do without hurting ourselves, which is why we’re still so deep in the elemental weeds. Mary does what she can with Grandpa Thomas’ notebooks, but until we have a few more years of hard study under our belts, we’re not going to be good for much of anything that doesn’t involve setting something on fire or deciding to build a snowman.”

  “Got it.” I did, sadly. They were still learning elementary math, addition and subtraction from and to the laws of physics. In a few more years, when they had transcended arithmetic, they’d be a lot more useful in situations like this one. Not that there’d ever been a situation like this one before. Not that there was—hopefully—ever going to be a situation like this one again.

  I finally turned my attention to the window. The sky was still profoundly orange, and had grown a few shades darker while we were talking. A millipede the size of a blimp was undulating gently by, not visibly held up by anything. “Does gravity work the same way here that it did back on Earth, or can we all fly now?”

  “It feels like it matches Earth gravity,” said Artie slowly.

  I hopped in place. It wasn’t a hearty jump, maybe eight inches or so all told, and as soon as I reached the apex, I fell right back down again, at the speed I would have expected if I’d been playing hopscotch in the driveway.

  “I think you’re right,” I said. “Those things up there don’t have wings, but they’re flying anyway. What do you think, gas bladders?”

  “I think that if there are flying bugs that big, I don’t want to see what eats them,” said Annie. “What happens when the suns go down?”

  “With three suns, it’s possible that it’s never going to be what we think of as true night,” said Artie. “One of them may always be in the sky, or there could even be a fourth sun that’s currently behind the planet that’s going to rise while the others are setting.”

  “This dimension is really stupid,” said Annie. “I do not like it here.”

  “No one’s asking you to,” I said, and moved cautiously toward the window. The millipede was gliding toward the horizon, and was enough bigger than anything else we’d seen so far that I supposed the centipede things were giving it a wide berth. Maybe it was their version of an apex predator, although the mental images that called to mind were uniformly unpleasant and nothing I really wanted to contemplate.

  The glass was intact, which was all the more impressive because some of the masonry around the window wasn’t. I leaned forward until my forehead touched the middle pane of the window, studying the university grounds outside. They were a uniform stretch of green, already starting to brown in places, although I couldn’t tell whether it was because this universe was antithetical to Earth life or just because grass didn’t enjoy the shock of being transported between dimensions.

  If we couldn’t survive here—or if my mammalian relations couldn’t survive, while Mark and I were going to be just fine—we’d know soon enough. Until we had signs that that was the case, we needed to carry on like everything was normal. Or as normal as everything could be when we were in a whole new dimension.

  There were a few cuckoos motionless in the grass outside, sprawled where they’d fallen. Some of them looked charred, and one that I could see looked like poorly-defrosted steak. Annie and James at work. Artie’s work would be harder to see from this distance. Cuckoos don’t have blood the way true mammals do; we have a clear fluid that’s closer in nature to insect hemolymph but serves the same purpose as hemoglobin. Biology is confusing. Anyway, without red stains to mark the bullet holes, I’d have to get right up o
n top of the bodies to know which ones were down there because my cousin had pulled a gun on them.

  The number of bodies I could see scattered around the lawn made me obscurely proud of my family. None of them was obviously pregnant, however, meaning none of them was Ingrid. I clearly remembered holding her close in the white void of my own mind, shoving the equation into her like a knife. All I’d done to her was what she’d been intending to do to me. All I had become in that moment was my mother’s daughter, and there was no way she could have survived the experience. I knew that, as surely as I knew that I had ten toes and blue eyes and no heartbeat.

  So where was she?

  “That’s not enough bodies,” I said.

  Annie bristled. “So sorry, princess. We would have been more effective murderers if we hadn’t been fighting for our lives at the same time.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant,” I said. I was unaccustomed to Annie interpreting my words in the least charitable way possible. I’d seen her do it to other people—her unfriendliness toward outsiders was legendary within the family—but never to me. “I mean, I know how good you are at killing things when you don’t have any other choice, and a whole swarm of cuckoos trying to end the world is sort of the definition of not having any other choice. There should be more corpses down there.”

  “She’s right,” said Artie. I managed to resist the urge to whip around and thank him for agreeing with me. It wasn’t easy. “I saw you set like a dozen of them on fire, and I shot at least six. The numbers don’t add up.”

  “Maybe something down there has been scavenging the bodies,” said Mark anxiously.

  “Or maybe some of them weren’t as dead as we thought they were,” said James. When everyone turned to look at him, he shrugged. “It could happen. Cuckoos aren’t strictly mammals the way we understand the term. Maybe freezing them won’t kill them the way it would a human.”