by Joseph Calev
“Well.” She sighed. “It’s been a long day for the both of us. If you don’t mind, I’m going to sleep. I suggest you don’t stay up too late. Tomorrow’s a big day.”
I looked out the window to the grass flowing with the wind. It didn’t look much different from Earth, though the forest with its three-dimensional terracing and strange plants was completely foreign.
“May I take a walk around? If it’s safe?”
“Of course, it’s safe.” She laughed. “Just don’t stay out too long and don’t go too far. You may get lost.”
“I’ll stay in the meadow.”
“And don’t forget to turn the suns off when you’re done.”
I shook my head. “Turn the suns . . . off?”
“Yes. There are two of them.” She slapped her head. “Oh! I’m so sorry, dear. Your planet was probably lit by a flaming ball of gas and plasma, correct?”
Admittedly, until then I thought that was the norm.
“Ours is a bit different. You’ll study them in school, but I have them set to a signal. Top one is two claps. Bottom one is three.”
“So, when I turn them off . . . they go off for everyone?”
“Of course not!” She smiled broadly. “I’m so sorry, but I’m very tired. Remind me tomorrow and I’ll explain.”
I nodded and returned to the living room, then resonated outside. It occurred to me that I could’ve just gone from my bedroom. There was no longer any reason to do a tour of the house on the way out.
Though the blades felt more like plastic straws, the grass was the most similar thing I’d seen yet. They even grew up, instead of down and side to side like everything else. They were a bit prickly to the skin, so I sat just beyond them and admired the view of the dueling suns. More orange and less blinding than Earth’s, they still looked ordinary.
As I was sitting, a strange bulge from my pocket caught my attention. I pulled out something that resembled a police badge, but had only the engraved letters ORECA with lots of stars surrounding it. On its back, instead of a fastening pin, was a rough rod. When I turned it over, I recognized some sort of key. It folded out to unlock something.
While examining the object, I moved to resonate back up to my room, then remembered Annie’s request and clapped twice. The top sun immediately disappeared. Three claps later it was midnight. I shook my head and retired to my bed.
From outside there was nothing: no crickets, tree kangaroos, birds, or even the rustle of the wind. I cradled my new-found key as I struggled to sleep in this deathly silence. With the same resonance as everything else here, it was clearly from the paramount dimension. Someone had slipped it into my pocket. Somewhere, there was something important I needed to open.
9
Annie tugged at my sheets in the morning.
“Time for school!”
For the first time I remembered, I was actually excited. Going this long without Raynee’s hooked smile was killing me. I hoped we had at least one class together.
Breakfast was a lamma fruit and some polka-dotted green soup. Since I knew the lamma was awesome, I devoured the soup first. It tasted like gingerbread, even though it was a soup. While I expected a school bus, she instead flew me there.
“It’s overkill to go this way, but we’ll use it until you learn.”
I had a feeling, unlike school back on Earth, that they may actually teach some useful stuff. By the time we arrived, every student was already there and classes had just begun. The building looked familiar, with its single floor, many windows, and multiple playgrounds outside. One of them had what resembled a three-hundred-foot rollercoaster, so that was a bit different. High-schoolers, of course, had no need for the lame stuff.
Annie left me outside, and a tall principal with a white shirt greeted me.
“Greetings, Jason,” he said.
He might as well have added “Earthling,” but he was being friendly about it.
“We’re so glad to have you here.”
“I’m glad to be here.” I didn’t lie.
He led me inside and smiled upon noticing that I already knew how to resonate. Sure, there was a lot to learn, but I was making quick progress. My highest desire, though, was to show Raynee what I’d learned.
We resonated into my classroom to the faces of twenty barely five-year-old kids. Each had a wide smile and shouted “Good morning, Jason!” when I entered.
I looked around. Save for the teacher, a rather attractive blonde in her mid-thirties, no one was taller than four feet. They were evenly divided over five of the six surfaces of the room.
The principal gave me an affable smile and pointed at a tiny seat on the ceiling. When I resonated over to it, the chair was barely large enough for my foot. With more than a little confusion, I stared at the teacher, who was making wave motions with her hand at me.
Finally, she sighed, walked over, and laid her hands flat over the table and chair. Instantly they increased threefold and I was able to sit.
“Now, class.” She stooped down with a wide grin that really gets little kids. “We’re going to have an easy day today, in honor of our new student in level zero. So, let’s begin by solving a basic equation. Jason, I did some research and on Earth it’s called the Riemann Hypothesis.”
Every one of those brats held out their hands for a screen to materialize, then all sorts of lines and funny symbols appeared. Apparently, their minds controlled it, because the numbers flew through their screens faster than any video game I’d seen. The teacher smiled at me and held out her hand. Evidently, she expected me to somehow follow.
“Create a screen.” She opened her hands like the kids had just done.
I held out my hands, but there was no screen.
“You need to synthesize it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You didn’t synthesize your own screens on that planet?”
“No. We had computers.”
“How quaint. Well, our new student has some homework for tonight, but we shouldn’t leave him out, should we?”
Every kid shook his head. “No, Alina!” they shouted. They’d all solved the equation anyway.
“Let’s do some differential equations in our heads.”
She wrote gibberish in midair, and every kid blurted an answer before she even finished. I remained with my mouth open.
“You of course had differential equations, right?”
“Well, we had them, but that’s kind of a college course, I think.”
Several kids fell off their chairs, laughing.
“So, what did you learn? The uncertainty principle . . . ?”
“Uncertainty principle! We talked about that one.”
“Very good.” She sighed in relief. “Kids, let’s each make a wormhole.”
A little girl next to me, who stood a good six inches below Sareya, twirled her arms to create a whirling hole. While its front consisted of swirling silver, from every other angle it was invisible. Within seconds, there were twenty of them.
“I think they left that part out,” I said.
The teacher gave a fake smile, then calmly twirled her hand to create one in front of me. To my relief, she then ignored me for the remainder of the class. There was a mathematics lesson, or at least I think that’s what she discussed. With the amount of symbols and graphs, it could’ve been art or Greek literature for all I knew.
At the end of the day, each of us jumped through our wormholes. I’d wondered for several hours what this portable whirlpool did, so I was excited to finally test it out. At first it felt like I’d put my face in a cotton candy machine that battered me through a multitude of dimensions, but I was soon transported back to exactly the same spot. It was the most spectacular yet thoroughly disappointing thing I’d ever done.
“We’re glad to have you here,” she said to me when every kid had left. “I’m so sorry they didn’t teach you the basics where you lived. I can stay after class to help, just not today. But you’ll need to put in a lot of effor
t, too.”
I nodded. Never before had I been so hopelessly destroyed. There was no possibility of meeting Raynee. She was finishing her last level at school, while I was officially the slowest student in level zero.
The grim realization sank in during the short ride home that, not only would I have no chance at Raynee, but I was likely to spend the rest of my life in kindergarten. Annie told me through her teary eyes that she knew I was in pain. Mastering resonance was nothing. Even a chimpanzee could walk, but would never have a chance as an adult in human society.
When we arrived home, I spent a few minutes staring at the bare walls in my room, then at the never-ending forest outside. But it wasn’t endless, was it? During the flight, I’d seen houses in its midst. Annie’s house enjoyed a great deal of land, but it was still part of civilization. Others lived here. Perhaps Raynee was one of them.
This universe was nothing without her. Resonance or gravity, neither mattered without those deep brown eyes and the twitch by her mouth. There had to be a way to see her, and it didn’t need to involve school. It was time to explore.
“Where are you going?” Annie asked after I’d resonated outside.
I hesitated, since here I was still practically a toddler. “I thought I’d take a walk.”
Her all-knowing eyes went straight into me, then she nodded ever slightly. “That forest goes quite a ways. How exactly do you intend to find your way back?”
“I’m not going too far.” I lied, though from her narrowed eyes I doubted she bought it.
“Just be careful. If you go too far, you can’t control the suns. The animals might turn them off.”
Well, that was a sobering thought. Even the friendly furries were smarter here. I nodded and set off. Yet before I’d gone three feet, she gently grabbed my arm.
“You probably want to go that way.” She pointed in the opposite direction I was going. I smiled and obliged.
Upon reaching the edge of the forest, I paused to contemplate my stupid idea. The land sloped down at least a few hundred feet before it disappeared into the tangles. I’d grown used to the concept that trees grew from the ground, but here there was a grand entanglement of every kind of greenery protruding from every other direction. In fact, what I’d been calling the ground in the first place was more like a cliff, leading to a precipice of unending limbs in every direction. How would I find my way in this three-dimensional mess?
With Annie watching me, I stepped onto a wide spiraling trunk and went twenty feet in. There had to be no visible hesitation here. Everywhere on my body shook with the things all trying to resonate with me. My legs began to wobble when I looked down to witness the endless patchwork at least a thousand feet below. If I fell, not only would I die, but I’d have plenty of time to think about it.
I resonated the shit out of that trunk while I inched my way to a tuft of brush that hung onto a trunk at least thirty feet in diameter. When I jumped onto it, my feet sank straight into mush. The entire tree was like quicksand! In an instant, I was covered to my waist.
I grabbed onto a nearby vine with all of my strength and attempted to pull myself out. Yet its smooth surface provided no traction, and my hands were slipping when three eyes appeared from its end and the whole vine coiled over to me. It was, in fact, more of a snake.
Then I heard a slurping sound and the tree spit me out on the opposite side. There was now nothing below me for several hundred feet. I had no chance to scream.
Only I didn’t fall. My body hung motionless in midair. I slapped myself awake. Of course. There was no gravity here. I was in no danger of falling. A tingling came from my right hand and I reached out to resonate to the nearest tree, then plopped my feet on its side. I stood to peer at the pit below me, then walked into it.
In this cacophony of limbs, the trunks were the paths. My senses cleared to reveal twisting pathways through the woods. Most reached and spiraled to no end, but in a world with no ups and downs, that didn’t mean much. It was like walking the track of a looping roller coaster without the fear of falling.
Earth forests had nothing on this. With a shout, I headed full speed down the nearest trunk, doing loops and corkscrews while ducking under giant yellow flowers and serpent vines. A huge bud rested on one branch and when I jumped over it, the thing burst into a million fragrant white petals. Instantly, the area around me turned into a snow kingdom of blossoms. I twirled under it, then leaped onto an adjoining trunk and raced over another one.
A hundred bright yellow birds fluttered around me, picking off as many petals as they could. They weren’t avian at all, of course, since they lacked wings, had black eyes with circles that looked drawn by a kid, and possessed tiny arms to grab the petals. Still, they fluttered and were cute.
This was like having my own gigantic theme park in my backyard. It possessed no lines and more rides than I could fit in in a lifetime. I leaped into an opening and resonated to a tree fifty feet away, then sat to admire the view. There was only one problem. I’d gone so deep into the jungle that I had no idea how to get home. Which way was it? Up, down, or to one of the sides?
I buried my head in my arms. How far did I go? It was impossible to know. While I’d been gone barely a half an hour, I’d changed directions so many times I could be a few feet away, or a mile. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a few beans I’d grabbed before leaving. Maybe a fuller stomach would clear my mind.
“Pardon me,” a deep voice called from behind.
I was saved!
Instead, I now faced a medium-sized rodent. He walked on two paws, while the other two were short and useless like a T-Rex. His fur was light brown with white spots, while his stomach was fully white.
“Are you going to eat those? I’d be so grateful if you’d give them to me.”
There was only a handful, and most were already in my mouth. I took a bean from my palm and placed it just in front of him. To my surprise, his short paws elongated so he could gingerly pick it up and plop it in his mouth. I swallowed the remainder, then smiled.
“May I have another, kind sir?” he asked with wide eyes.
“I’m sorry. I ate the rest.”
“Well, go fuck yourself then.” He turned his back. Just before he left, he let out a low growl and the light disappeared. I was now lost and completely in the dark.
I sat and cried. Raynee was furious at me, and I easily qualified as the dumbest student in this dimension’s school system. I still had the Oreca badge with its key, but that was pointless. There was absolutely no hope of locating whatever it unlocked, because even the way back home was beyond me.
10
With no moon to go by, I couldn’t even make out my hand in front of me. I tried to clap the suns back on, but they were on a different program here. I must’ve gone far enough to leave Annie’s property.
I sat there on my tree for a good thirty minutes. My only hope was for Annie to find me. I could barely navigate this jungle in the day, let alone at night. The thought occurred that there may be critters here who could eat me.
“You know, you’re not very smart for your age,” a young girl’s voice called from behind me.
Just when I whirled around, the suns appeared and a light beam nearly blinded me. The tree shot me off, but I remained floating.
“Sorry about that.” It was dark again. “This is Sareya.”
I’d never been so happy in my life.
“You know you’re not human, right?”
I couldn’t say anything.
“You don’t need the light,” she said.
“Umm, kind of.”
“Nope. Do you think because you can’t see, that things aren’t there?”
“No.”
“Good. Then feel them.”
Again, I had no reply.
“Everything resonates just like you. Use that to know where they are.”
She wasn’t returning the suns on purpose. I closed my eyes and reached my hand over the wood underneath me. Not only did
it resonate, but each bump and knot did so differently. There was a minute change where it reached slightly toward me, or bucked away.
When I held my hand farther away, I detected not just what was next to me, but traces of things distant. I let my entire body take it in. There was a branch just to the left. I felt its three spirals that ended in an explosion of leaves. I could count them. Thirty feet from me was a much thicker trunk. I turned, and there was Sareya, her curls winding like the forest around us. She had an embroidered dress on, and she was smiling.
“How did you find me?”
“Annie asked me to keep an eye on you. Thought you might get lost.”
I couldn’t argue with that logic.
She turned the lights back on and no longer did I just see the winding limbs encircling me, I felt them. Sareya was now crossing her arms.
“You got lost, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. Then some crazy rodent cursed at me and turned off the suns.”
She laughed. “I think someone had fun with your translator.”
My head bumped back.
“You know we don’t speak the same language, right? Our translators make us think so.”
“Translator?” I was dumbfounded. I didn’t recall anyone handing me one.
“It’s in your brain, silly. They put one in you when you moved here.”
That was the least surprising thing I’d heard that day.
“How was your first day at school?”
I sighed. That was the last thing I wanted to think of at the moment. “I’m the dumbest one in level zero.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” replied my six-year-old shrink.
“Well.” I tried to not act so down to this cheerful little girl. “It was just my first day, and Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
“What’s Rome?”
“It’s a city.”
She blinked several times. “Do you mean, where you lived it took an entire day for someone to build a city?”
“Actually, it took a lot of someones many years.”
“Wow.” She was aghast. “That’s horrible.”
