“One is not the speed-dating type,” said Three. “Or the any-kind-of-dating type. Every dimension is slightly or wildly different. Believe me, she’s tried other Philips, usually for embarrassingly long weekends. It never works out, probably because they recognize that she’s a dimension-hopping Lady Hitler, and only a dimension-hopping Stalin would want to hang out with her for more than two minutes before jumping out the nearest airlock.”
“Or just a Hitler.”
“Don’t be silly. Hitler was definitely a woman, and I’ve seen her up close. Anyway, One and these other Philips never ‘click’ but it’s not for a lack of trying. These days we just take turns if there’s a new Philip.”
“You take turns?”
“I said them! Them, not me. One, Two, and Four are insane beasts. They torture these poor copies of Philip, and when they’re done with the pitiful souls, they break them down on a quantum level just like they want to do with you. Us! I mean us.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Exactly what I said the second I found out,” said Three. “And then I escaped. That’s the honest truth.”
Lim ran up to them, her tiny shoes spraying sand.
“I found you!” she said, her face flushed. “Uncle says it’s time to go. We’ll have lunch and take you to Bennie’s.”
Amy stood up and brushed sand from the back of her skirt.
“Let’s go,” she said. “I need some benevolent women in my life.”
Chapter Six
On a mountain high above the Pacific, a pine forest swayed in the cold morning breeze blowing up from the ocean. An orange tabby lay on a low-hanging branch of a tree, the strong air currents blowing his fur and making the green pine needles bounce and hiss. Past the end of the branch, a steep slope of chaparral and chemise brush angled steeply and dropped more than a thousand meters to the waves booming against the black rocks of the coast.
On the ground below Sunflower, the gigantic armored tank lay on a carpet of brown needles in a strange mechanical symmetry with the orange cat, large steel paws stretched flat and head tilted back at a sharp angle to expose the tandem seats of the cockpit. To Sunflower’s relief, the powerful machine was in standby mode, and silent. Given the high number of sarcastic comments directed at him, the flight computer either disliked the orange tabby more than any other cat he’d ever met, or was training for a second career as a stand-up comedian in some flop-joint bar for retired computer cores. Sunflower sighed and rested his chin on his paws.
Wood cracked from below, and he blinked his yellow eyes.
“I’m trying to take a nap, Betsy.”
The brown-and-white terrier looked up from beside a higgledy-piggledy pile of twigs and small branches.
“Sorry, Sunnie! I’m making a fire. Do you wanna help?”
“No, I don’t and stop asking me. There’s no point to make a fire if we’re trying to hide from everyone!”
Betsy tilted his furry head. “How are we going to cook our food?”
“We don’t need to eat for at least another week! Those boxes of survival rations are for normal cats. Even if you could eat them, they’re for emergencies and taste like wet cement on a hot summer day! Trust me, I was in Cat Scouts.”
“I bet they’ll taste better if we cook them.”
Sunflower sighed and stared at the fuzzy line of the horizon where the ocean met the sky. “How can you go from something complex like piloting an armored military vehicle to wandering through the woods and collecting firewood like a lost kitten?”
“Kittens? I don’t see any kittens. Hey! I hear something. Is that what you mean?”
A heavy and deliberate weight pressed on the pine needles at the edge of the clearing. A very large mountain lion blinked in the sun as he crept to the edge of the hollow, staring intently at Betsy and placing each paw carefully in front of him on the pine needles.
Betsy shook his furry head. “Whoa! I’ve never seen a kitten that big. What did his parents feed him?”
“He’s not a kitten, he’s a mountain lion,” hissed Sunflower. “Run for the cockpit or he’ll eat you!”
The mountain lion paused for a moment at Sunflower’s voice coming from the trees, then continued to creep toward the small terrier.
“I hope he doesn’t want to eat me, because I don’t taste good at all,” said Betsy. He licked his front paw. “Yuck! Tastes like dirt. Why don’t you just talk to him in cat language? I’ll make him a sandwich if he’s hungry.”
“This is Old Earth, where the size of the cat is all that matters,” whispered Sunflower. “If you’re not going to run, at least make a lot of noise. Maybe he’ll get scared.”
“Okay,” said Betsy, and began to dance a jig on his back feet around the pile of wood. “Hey, doodle-ee-doo, the cat ran up a tree. Hey doodle-ee-doo, he looked what he could see. Hey, doodle-ee-doo, he saw a boat upon the sea. Hey doodle-ee-doo, it’s the sailor’s life for me!”
Sunflower covered his face with a paw and groaned. “I take it back. Let him eat you already!”
The mountain lion growled and jumped at Betsy, knocking over the pile of twigs and throwing survival rations around the clearing. The terrier dropped to all fours and scrambled out of the way of the fangs and huge black paws.
“Wow,” said Betsy. “I don’t want to be friends that much, Mister Kitten.”
He dodged several swipes of the sharp claws and teeth of the mountain lion, but at last the large cat trapped the dog against a tree trunk with his powerful front legs.
“Help, Sunnie!” yelped Betsy. “He’s going to eat me!”
Sunflower gathered his paws under him and prepared to jump down, when the giant armored tank jerked to life and whipped its steel tail into the side of the mountain lion with a loud thud. The large, beige-colored animal roared in pain and fled down the mountain in a spray of dry needles.
Sunflower jumped down to the base of the tree where the small dog lay motionless.
“Betsy! I’m sorry I called you an idiot. Please don’t die!”
The terrier opened his brown eyes and sat up. “I was playing dead. If you don’t move, they won’t eat you because they think dead things are nasty.”
“That doesn’t work when the cat is right in front of you, moron.”
“You just said you were sorry for calling me an idiot, and now you’re calling me a moron?”
“Forget it. You should thank that stupid cat vehicle for saving your life. Using its tail was a nice move. I was getting ready to watch the mountain lion rip off your stinky flesh and chew on your titanium-laced bones. Talk about a horrible breakfast.”
Betsy trotted over to armored cat and patted the gray metal flank. “Thanks, Wilbur!”
The steel tail of the giant, tiger-shaped vehicle thumped twice on the pine needles.
Sunflower blinked. “Wilbur?”
“That’s his name. If you made friends and talked to people once in a while, you’d learn these things, Sunnie.”
“You can’t be friends with a machine, and I’m allergic to learning.”
The orange tabby lay on the soft needles and stared for a long moment at Betsy’s shambolic pile of sticks.
“This entire stupid situation is my fault,” he murmured.
Betsy scrambled over to him. “Let’s go find Amy and Philip! They’ll want to know about the mountain lion.”
Sunflower blinked. “The ship crashed in the ocean, and I can’t detect any beacons or radio transmissions that aren’t encrypted. We won’t see Amy or Philip again.”
“Where did they go?”
“Heaven.”
“I thought only dogs went to heaven.”
“Do you actually have a brain, or is it a pair of dried peas rattling around inside your skull? I’m not going to debate the afterlife with you. The fact is, the ship blew up, crashed in the ocean, and the only transmissions I can pick up with the radio equipment are encrypted. From here we’ve got a direct line of sight to where the crash happened, and would
be able to receive any signals for a hundred kilometers. The only reason they aren’t looking for us is because everyone in that ship is at the bottom of the sea, and dead.”
“I think you’re wrong,” said Betsy. “I’d know if Amy or Philip were dead. I’d feel it.”
“With what? The radio in your head?”
“No, with my feelings.”
“Just shut up,” growled Sunflower. “If any more stupid gush comes out of your snout, I’ll make you feel something!”
“What about the other transmissions? That could be Amy.”
Sunflower’s eyes widened and he jumped up. “You’re right! But not our Amy––the evil copy of Amy, the one that kidnapped my wife! The encrypted radio signals must be coming from her. She’s the one who probably blew up the ship!”
“See, Sunnie? I’m not so dumb.”
“Even a broken clock is right twice a day,” said Sunflower. “This evil clone has a ship with a transmat, which means after we rescue Andy, we can leave Old Earth and get back to a civilized dimension.”
Betsy hopped up and down. “Cool! A rescue mission!”
“The question is, how? All the poona bones are stacked on the side of evil Amy––she’s got a starship, probably a crew of murderous pirates, and Andy. We’ve got the most powerful armored vehicle in the Imperial cat army, but it can’t exactly jump into space and catch a starship.”
“Don’t worry,” said Betsy. “Wilbur’s the greatest! He saved us from the crash, remember?”
Sunflower nodded and stared at the giant armored cat for a long moment.
“Maybe we do have a chance,” he said quietly. “But only if we trick them into coming down to us.”
Betsy spun a circle, spraying pine needles over Sunflower.
“Hooray!”
The civic leaders and tourist brochures in Amy’s time constantly touted Pacific Grove as “America’s Last Hometown.” From Amy’s bouncing viewpoint in the back of a rattling truck in 1912, it looked nothing like a “last” and more like a “first.” Past the green slopes of the Presidio and the rotting stench of the long wooden canneries stood a grid of proud and brightly painted Victorian houses.
The railroad station for Monterey was east of the canneries, and the line of railroad tracks kept going past the fish factories, Chinese village, and small wooden shacks full of fishery-related business to the coastal rocks of Pacific Grove and its packed arrangement of quaint houses. In 1995, the tracks had long been replaced with a wide asphalt path, just as the Chinese women in their faded brown and blue jackets would be replaced with runners in sweat pants and panting tourists in four-person, pedal-driven carts. Amy felt like a tourist herself as she gaped at the women washing clothes outdoors, workmen hammering away at the beams of a new house, and barefoot children running in every direction along the muddy streets.
After a lunch of hot noodles and fresh red apples from the harvest fair, Lim’s uncle drove his rattling truck a mile up to Pacific Grove and dropped off the girls at Lighthouse Avenue.
Not far away and up the hill on the corner of Forest and Pine loomed the Benevolent Society of Methodist Women of Pacific Grove. The whitewashed Queen Anne tower was topped with a cone-shaped roof of gray shingles and a bronze cross. A white picket fence shielded the massive wooden structure from the mud of passing horses and clattering Model T cars. The front garden was full of yellow peonies and rose bushes, the buds dead and snipped long before the cold of autumn.
Amy, Lim, and Three walked up the sloping street past three-story wooden houses of Gothic design and pastel color, grocers with fruits and vegetables on tables at the front, a bakery, a tailor and seamstress shop, and a car-repair business with a black Model T poking its nose out the wide front doors.
A man in a leather apron folded the engine cover to the side and leaned over the slowly popping, exposed motor. He glanced up at the three girls and dropped a wrench onto the engine with a loud clang as they walked up the hill. A moment later, a pair of women in ankle-length dresses and wide hats passed by with angry glares.
Amy pointed down at her pink blouse and beige skirt. “Everyone is staring at me, so I should probably find some new clothes. But you know … these fit so well and actually saved my life. Honestly, I’d rather keep wearing them.”
Lim shrugged. “Your skirt is short and above the knees, that is true. You are also not wearing stockings. The Methodists are very upset about such things.”
“Above the knees?” snorted Three. “Where I’m from, only nuns wear skirts that long. In fashion terms, it’s like, from the stone age.”
“Nuns in your dimension probably have face tattoos and nose piercings,” said Amy.
“How did you know?”
“A wild guess.” Amy stopped and tugged at the hem of her wool skirt. “If I could only make it longer …”
Amy’s knees tingled where the inside liner touched her skin, and the fabric squirmed under her fingers.
Lim pointed at the hem. “It moves!”
The hem quickly dropped over Amy’s knees, flowing down to the top of her borrowed boots, and split in the back, allowing her to walk freely. On the pale pink cotton of her blouse, a pattern of tiny flowers appeared, matching the blouse of a woman Amy had passed a moment before.
“That’s the freakiest thing I’ve ever seen,” said Three. “I’ll take a dozen.”
Amy put her hands on her waist. “Don’t worry. I’ve got a wardrobe full of temperature-adjusting, bulletproof clothing with millions of tiny nanite bugs living in them. No, wait––it’s at the bottom of the ocean.”
“Probably for the best. The galactic economy would screech to a grinding halt if no one had to shop for clothes ever again.”
“Miss Three is dressed as a Chinese, and that is also a problem,” said Lim. “A white girl wearing clothes of a Chinese girl is very odd.”
Three raised an arm and buried her face in the elbow of her jacket. The teenager hunched over and hobbled up the street like an old man, dragging one leg.
“Is this better? You can’t see my face.”
Lim shook her head. “It is not better. People will stare even more at this.”
“I don’t know,” said Amy. “We can’t see your face, so that’s an improvement.”
Three stopped and wagged a finger. “Hey! Don’t be talking crap about my looks. It’s your pretty face too, you know.”
A truck roared along Pine Street and sprayed the girls with specks of mud. The girls shrieked and ran across the street to the white wooden castle of the Benevolent Society. On the picket fence, a sign painted with gold letters announced that they were, in fact, in the right place.
Lim pushed open the front gate. “Bennies will help you to find your family,” said the Chinese girl. “They help girls in trouble.”
“That’s definitely me,” said Three. “I’m always in trouble or making it.”
Amy followed Lim through the gate. “I don’t think time travel or trans-dimensional displacement is the kind of trouble she means.”
“No? How about a crashed spaceship?”
“Really doubt it.”
Lim tilted her head. “My English is not very good, so I do not understand what you ask. But Bennies are very nice and always help.”
She led them up the stairs of the porch and knocked on a forest-green door decorated with a wreath of autumn leaves.
“There’s something creepy about this place,” murmured Three.
Amy spread her hands. “What? It’s probably a soup kitchen for orphans. You know––Victorian London, Oliver Twist and stuff.”
Three turned and pointed at the empty dirt avenue. “I don’t mean the house, I mean this town. Too many trees and birds and squirrels and clouds.”
“Nothing weird about that. Where you born on a space station or something?”
Three blinked. “Of course I was! What kind of question is that?”
“Oh,” said Amy. “Sorry.”
Footsteps thumped faintly insi
de the house and curtains swayed in the nearby window. A woman in her late forties opened the door, wearing a dress of dark brown serge decorated with black piping. Her red hair was streaked with gray and piled in a bun on top of her head. She smiled and wrinkles spread across her pink cheeks like rings from a pebble thrown into a pond.
“Good afternoon, Lim!” she said. “I’ll fetch the box for Mrs. Foo.”
The Chinese girl bowed. “Thank you, Mrs. Morgan, but I am not come for those things. There is a problem. These friends are from the sinking ship. Please, can I introduce Amy, and introduce Three.”
“Teresa!” blurted Amy. “She means Teresa.”
Mrs. Morgan covered her mouth. “A shipwreck? When?”
“In the night. My father took them from the water.”
“You poor dears! That’s why you’re wearing Oriental garments.”
She pulled all three of the girls inside with cobra-like speed. Before Amy or Three could protest, they found themselves wrapped in thick blankets and pushed onto a soft velvet couch. The room around them seemed ripped from a Victorian museum, with flowery wallpaper, globed lamps with velvet shades, and thick Persian rugs of deep brown. The sharp smell of wood polish hung in the air, along with the faint odors of licorice, roses, and ammonia.
Amy held a steaming cup of tea and saucer on her lap, summoned as if out of thin air by the attentive Mrs. Morgan. She shrugged the blanket off her shoulders.
“Thank you very much, but we’re not cold or wet. The shipwreck happened last night, and since then Lim and her family have been helping us.”
Mrs. Morgan nodded. “Yun Chow and his relatives are honest, church-going people. I shudder to think what would have happened if you girls had been saved by some of the other very un-Christian characters that inhabit that fishing village. This story of yours is very peculiar, and the first I’ve heard about a wreck. It wasn’t the Humboldt, was it? The storm beached a Navy submarine, and I feared that other ships would be torn apart by that devilish wind.” She clasped her hands in front of her chest. “Dear, oh dear! My nephew works on the Humboldt!”
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