Imaginary Numbers

by Seanan McGuire

  It was really a pity cuckoos couldn’t understand the nuances of human expressions. The sweetness of Elsie’s smile was a thing of pure and genuine beauty.

  “Oops,” she said.

  Mark kept rubbing his head but didn’t say anything.

  “How many cuckoos are in your hive?” asked Antimony.

  “With Heloise out of the picture, and not counting myself, three,” he said. “If Sarah’s already finished with her instar, four, and the fourth is a big fat ‘game over’ for the rest of us. She’ll be suggestible. Ingrid is right there to make suggestions.”

  “Sarah won’t hurt us.” My voice wavered, making my statement sound almost more like a question.

  Mark twisted in his seat to face me directly. He looked almost sorry. Somehow, that was the most terrifying thing to happen in this entire terrifying night.

  “Sarah won’t have a choice,” he said. “No one really knows for sure what a Queen is like, because we get one per dimension. She enters her fourth instar, she blows a hole in reality, and if she’s lucky, it kills her, because if she’s not lucky, she melts her own brain in the process of getting the math to work just the way she wants it to, and we’re not a species of caretakers.”

  “You mean you’d just leave her to die?” asked Sam.

  “Sure,” said Mark. “Let’s go with that.”

  “Maybe she hasn’t entered her fourth instar yet,” said Antimony.

  “Then maybe we have a chance,” said Mark. He turned back to Elsie. “I’d drive faster if I were you.”

  Elsie slammed her foot down on the gas.

  I closed my eyes. The anti-telepathy charm around my neck suddenly seemed impossibly heavy. If Sarah was in range, I didn’t know it. I couldn’t know it. And that meant she couldn’t know we were coming for her. She was cut off. She was alone.

  She had to be so scared.

  We’re on our way, Sarah, I thought, and wished there was any way I could lie to myself and believe she would hear me. Hold on, because we’re coming. We’re coming just as fast as we can.

  Hold on.

  Eighteen

  “Breathe, baby, breathe. You breathe and you keep on breathing. That’s the only thing I’m going to ask of you today. You just keep on breathing.”

  —Enid Healy

  In the shining whiteness of the infinite void, which sort of sucks, to be honest

  HELLO?”

  My voice didn’t echo. An echo implied a wall, however distant, for it to bounce off of. Instead, it dropped away like a stone falling into a well, dense and dull and disregarded.

  There was no ground under my feet, but I was standing anyway, toes pointed outward instead of dangling down. I raised one foot and stomped experimentally. There was no feeling of resistance; my foot simply stopped when it hit what my brain insisted on thinking of as the floor.

  Maybe the thought was the problem. I closed my eyes. There is no floor, I told myself sternly. There is nothing for me to stand on.

  The sensation of falling was immediate and stomach-churning, as the not-a-floor beneath me took my thoughts to heart and dissolved, leaving me to plummet through the nothingness. I screamed before I could think better of it, and my terror sounded as wrung-out and empty as everything else.

  “There’s a floor!” I shouted. “There’s a floor there’s a floor there’s a floor—”

  The impact when my feet hit the reconstituted floor was enough to send me sprawling, my entire body aching from the sudden stop. I lay where I was, suspended on a flat, seemingly solid surface that looked exactly like everything else surrounding me. No walls, no ceiling, but there was a floor now, called into existence by my demands.

  I rolled onto my back and stared up into the nothingness. My throat hurt from the screaming and my ankles hurt from the landing and everything was awful. Everything was absolutely, utterly, no questions about it, awful.

  Laboriously, I sat up and looked around again. Any hopes that the void would have changed during my fall were for naught: the world around me was as blank and white and empty as it had been before. The only thing to indicate that I had moved at all was the ache in my butt and ankles, and even as I thought about it, the ache faded away, like my body couldn’t hold onto even the idea of pain.

  That was actually a good thing. It meant I wasn’t really here; this was another mindscape, like the one I’d entered when Artie was caught in the cuckoo’s trap. Only this time, the mindscape was mine, and I was the one in the trap. There was no one coming to get me out of this.

  I needed to get out on my own.

  “This sucks,” I announced, on the off chance that one of the cuckoos who’d stolen me happened to be listening. “If you were hoping to convince me to help you do some horrible cuckoo thing, this is not a good way of going about it. This is frightening and inconvenient and . . . and mean, and I don’t work with people who are mean to me.”

  There was no answer. To be fair, I hadn’t been expecting one.

  I looked around the void again, searching for anything that would break the endless whiteness. Then I paused. This was my mindscape. It, and everything it contained, belonged to me. Which meant that anything I could think of should be right at my fingertips.

  “I want a chair,” I said to the air in front of me. “Not too comfortable. A chair where I can sit and think.”

  I turned.

  There was a chair behind me.

  It was simple, plain black leather with polished brass casters, the sort of thing that belonged behind a desk in a home office. It could have been placed in the window of any office supply store in the world, glistening in the light, inviting weary souls to set their burdens down for the low, low price of a few hundred dollars with an available installment plan. I took a step toward it, reaching out to run my fingertips along one faux-mahogany arm.

  It felt solid and real, as real as I was. Which made sense. In here, we were both thoughts, and my thoughts were sufficient to change the world.

  I sank down into the leather, tucking my legs up under myself in a cat-curl position that had been my preference when working since I was a kid. I stared at the nothingness in front of me.

  “I need a chalkboard,” I said, and blinked, deliberately slow.

  When I opened my eyes again, the chalkboard was there, old-fashioned and tall, green slate pristine as it awaited my genius. Two fresh erasers sat in the tray beneath it, alongside sticks of chalk in multiple colors. It was a chalkboard out of a children’s movie, pushed into place by the set designer of my thoughts, ready for me to begin.

  I didn’t move.

  The chalkboard was tempting—more tempting than any chalkboard I’d ever seen—and there were numbers nibbling at the edges of my mind, glorious numbers, numbers that whispered promised solutions to every problem I’d ever had and every dilemma I’d ever faced. I could use those numbers to get myself out of here, I just knew it. Something was holding me back.

  I’d seen numbers like this before. Not often. They shifted and twisted when I tried to focus on them directly, flickering like candles in a soft wind, never quite going out, never quite holding still. I’d seen these same numbers when I injured myself in New York, blossoming around the edges of my consciousness before I hit the ground and everything went away. They meant something. They resolved to something.

  I closed my eyes again. “I need a desk, a laptop, and an Internet connection.”

  They were there when I opened my eyes. The desk was old and scarred, and I recognized it from my father’s office. He’d built it himself out of reclaimed wood, blending oak and mahogany, pine and cedar. It was a patchwork thing, like he was, and when I reached out to caress the wood with one trembling hand, it was almost like he was there with me, watching over me. Tears burned at the corners of my eyes. I blinked them away. If I didn’t find a way out of here, I was never going to se
e him again. I couldn’t let that happen.

  The laptop was much newer, sleek and futuristic and generic. I tugged it toward me and opened a chat client.

  My entire family was offline. That was a disappointment, but not a surprise. There was no way of knowing whether the Internet connection I’d imagined would correlate in any way to the world outside my mindscape. But I hoped it would.

  In an earlier era, I might have imagined pigeons with notes tied to their legs, or hunting horns, or some other clumsy mechanism of communicating across great distances. Here and now, the Internet was the answer. I kept scrolling through the listed names, each with the little grayed-out dot that meant they weren’t available to talk to me. I scrolled faster and faster, past every person I’d ever touched, every person I’d ever made a connection with, every person who might have been able to hear me. There were so many of them. There weren’t nearly enough.

  The last name on the list, Ingrid, was the only one with a green dot.

  I hesitated, staring at that name, staring at that dot, before finally clicking on it and pulling up a chat window.

  What did you do to me? I typed.

  The cursor blinked for several seconds before the reply popped up: Sarah?

  Yes. This is Sarah. What did you do to me?

  How are you talking to me right now? You’re in the middle of your metamorphosis. You can’t be talking to me.

  I narrowed my eyes, glaring at the computer screen like I thought she could somehow see it. No one bothered to tell me the rules, so I guess I don’t have to follow them, I typed. Where am I? Why is this happening to me?

  Again, the cursor blinked, longer this time. Finally, the response came: You’re going to change the world, Sarah. I’m very proud of you. More proud than you can possibly know. You need to do the math now. You need to solve the problem, so we can move forward.

  At least this was easy. No.

  You don’t have a choice.

  I think I do, I typed. I think I can just sit here and not touch the numbers. I have a computer now. I can look at pictures of cute cats on Tumblr.

  Forever?

  That gave me pause.

  This was my mind, yes, but it was functionally an exercise in solitary confinement at the same time. Yes, I had a computer, with a telepath’s makeshift connection to the illusion of the Internet, and yes, I could call things into being by wanting them strongly enough, and no, that didn’t change the fact that I was alone in here. My family was out of range; the only person I could talk to was Ingrid, and she could just decide to stop talking whenever she wanted to. She could cut me off. She could leave me by myself in this blazing whiteness, until I started doing the math out of the desperate need to get out, to get away.

  Maybe. Or maybe this was like a holodeck in Star Trek, and I could start calling people out of my memories of them, using them for company, for stability, for a way to keep myself from doing what the cuckoos wanted from me. Because if there was one thing I knew for sure, it was that doing what the cuckoos wanted wasn’t going to end well. Not for anyone.

  “Took you this long to come to that conclusion, huh? Maybe you’re not as smart as you’ve always said you were.”

  “Verity!” I looked up and there she was in all her glory—literally. She was dressed like she was heading for a dance competition, wearing heels so high that it seemed impossible she could walk in them and a short, fringed garment that barely qualified for the name “dress.” “Moderately long shirt” might have been a better description. The individual crystals stitched to the fabric gleamed and sparkled in the light, and her short blonde hair had been crimped into perfect finger waves, making her look like the very image of a Gibson Girl.

  But her dress was gray, and her lipstick was gray, and neither of those things made sense. I wouldn’t imagine her that way.

  “What’s wrong with your lips?” I blurted.

  Verity smiled a little. “I can say this because I’m not really me and you know it, which means you know this, and you just never wanted to tell yourself. You can’t see the color red.”

  “Of course I can. My favorite sweater is red.”

  “And you know that because you’ve seen it through your father’s eyes. You know what red is because you borrow it from the people around you, so naturally that you don’t even notice that everything red is gray for half a second before the color turns on. That’s how it’s always worked for you.”

  I looked at her blankly. “What does that have to do with anything? Why isn’t the color turning on in here?”

  “Normal cuckoos don’t see the color red. They’ve never cared enough about how humans work to learn how to see it. Biologically, structurally, you can’t see it. It isn’t there for you. Socially, emotionally, you can see it. You had to learn how in order to be happy.” Verity took a step backward, leaning her hip against the chalkboard. “I’m not here.”

  “I know.”

  “You could make me think I was here, if you wanted to, but you’d know I wasn’t.”

  “I would.” I glanced around at the nothingness. “Right now, anyway. If we stayed here long enough, I wouldn’t know it anymore. I could let this be the world. I could imagine more than just you.”

  A smile tugged at the corner of Verity’s grayed-out lips. “No red.”

  “No red,” I agreed. “But I’d be able to understand faces. That would be a nice change. You have a beautiful smile.”

  “You’re remembering other people thinking that I had a beautiful smile,” Verity corrected gently. “You don’t know. Not really.”

  I glanced at my computer. Ingrid had apparently noticed that I wasn’t responding to her anymore; she had typed my name so many times that it scrolled the chat client. Gently, I closed the screen and returned my attention to Verity.

  “Does it matter what I know?” I asked. “If it’s in here, and it seems real, it is real. Everything here is whatever I want it to be. I think . . . I think I could be happy.”

  “Hiding inside your own mind? Really?”

  “Do you have a better idea?” I exclaimed, pushing myself out of the chair. I spread my hands, indicating the white nothingness around us. “All this is happening because the cuckoos want me to do the math! They want me to reach my next instar! I don’t know if you were paying attention when Mom tried to teach us about cuckoos, but doing what they want is never the right answer!”

  “Neither is running away and hiding, and that’s what you’re trying to do. We’re Prices. We don’t hide.”

  “I’m not a Price!”

  “You took your last name from a science fiction novel about creepy telepathic children who want to destroy the world,” said Verity. “That may be one of the most Price-like things you could have done. You’re family. We raised you right. You’re a Price, and Prices don’t run, or hide, or refuse to do something because it might be dangerous.”

  “But the cuckoos—”

  “Want you to do some math. You love math. Math loves you. Do their damn math so you can get the hell out of here and stomp their blue-eyed asses into the floor.” Verity shook her head. “I believe in you. Artie believes in you. It’s time you started to believe in you, too. You can’t fight if you’re in the hole. Get out of the hole, and then come see me for real. I miss you, you big jerk.”

  “What if I can’t?” I whispered. The numbers nibbling at the edges of the world felt . . . big. They felt massive in a way I’d never encountered before, like they were the numbers that underpinned the entire universe. Tackling them wouldn’t just be like adding two and two together to see whether I got four. It would be like reinventing calculus, written in starlight and graded by the moon.

  “You’re Sarah Zellaby,” she said. “Of course you can.”

  I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, Verity was gone.

  Slowly, I sank back down into the sea
t I’d conjured and opened my laptop. Ingrid was still filling the screen with my name, over and over again, an unending stream of letters that seemed to lose all meaning as they went on. Words were like that. They were fragile, mutable. Their meanings changed depending on the context. “Sarah” could be me, or someone else, or a pet, or a doll, or a piece of heavy machinery owned by an overly sentimental construction engineer. It wasn’t fixed.

  Math, though . . . math never changed. Math always meant exactly what it said, no more and no less, and refused to be written for anyone. Math was always math. If I turned myself into numbers, I would be a wholly unique equation, something so much bigger and wilder and harder to define than “Sarah.” I looked at the screen again. I put my fingers on the keys.

  Give me one good reason, I typed. Give me one good reason I should help you after you hurt Artie, and threatened my family, and brought me here against my will. Give me one good reason I should do this math for you, and not for myself.

  Because if you do, she replied, we’ll go away forever.

  I stopped. Then, haltingly, I typed, What do you mean, you’ll go away forever?

  I mean the cuckoos. All of us. We’ll take the answer you give us, and we’ll open a door, and we won’t look back. They’re gathering, Sarah. The cuckoos are sending out the call, and they’re gathering, ready for you to open the way. You can save this world from us. You can create a future without fear of what’s lurking where you can’t see. Isn’t that enough for you?

  There had to be a catch. There was always a catch. But the numbers were nibbling at the edges of the world, and whatever it was, I couldn’t see it.

  I solve, you go, I typed. Promise.

  Promise.

  Something about this felt wrong. I took a deep breath and answered anyway.

  Fine, I wrote. Now go away and let me work.

  I closed my eyes. Only for a moment, but when I opened them the laptop was gone, taking the desk with it. It was just me and the chalkboard, pristine, inviting, waiting for me to get started.