by Dakota Rusk
There was just one big difference: Donald and Ntombi were also brainiacs—unlike yours truly, who had come to Parallel U. on a sports scholarship and who still struggled to understand the most basic principles of physics and astronomy. Donald was studying geology and Ntombi cometology, and sometimes they had conversations that excluded me. Donald, for instance, was very excited about how plate tectonics had over the millennia produced the same continental formations in every single parallel except for two, and what could possibly be the explanation for those having been different? To which Ntombi countered that similarly, every single parallel had recorded Halley’s comet (though of course not always by that name) except for one; what had happened to the comet in that parallel?…I would listen, enjoying their excitement and wonder, yet not really sharing it.
But though I was outstripped intellectually, I was recognized as the leader of our little band—if only because I’d had so many adventures and done so many famous things. That was a big difference between my new friends and my old, who still treated me like I was almost a kind of pet or something.
Another difference, of course, was that my old group was a quartet, and this new one only a trio. But though I didn’t know it at the time, a fourth member would soon be joining us.
And it would be the most unlikely addition I ever could have imagined.The more time I spent with Donald and Ntombi, the more concerned I was that my older friends would notice it and feel rejected. I don’t know why I cared; after all, I wouldn’t be hanging around with new friends at all if they hadn’t made me feel like I didn’t fit in with them anymore. Even so, I still loved them a lot; and as much fun as I was having with my new crew, I did find myself missing them.
But it seemed I didn’t need to worry about them being hurt by my abandoning them for replacement friends. They were so deeply devoted to defeating the fast-approaching referendum that they scarcely paid any attention to me at all—not even Merri, who was my roommate. I almost never saw her; she was busy with classes during the day, then afterwards she and the boys would meet with Valery to talk strategy and tactics until late in the night. About the only time Merri ever turned her attention on me was to ask me, yet again, what Jocasta Foxglove had told me at the cocktail reception. Because so far, the witches hadn’t produced any ace in the hole, and I could tell that Merri and the others were beginning to wonder if I’d got it wrong somehow, and made them waste all this time and worry for nothing. “What were her exact words, Fabia?” Merri would ask. “What exactly did she say to you?”
And of course every time she asked—looking at me with those desperate, pleading eyes—I felt less sure I knew. I repeated what I’d told her before, which I thought was verbatim—“She said she didn’t need me to convince the undecided voters; she said not only was I not her last chance to persuade them, I wasn’t even her best chance”—but each time I said it, it sounded more made up, even to me; so that I found myself wondering if I had imagined it.
I understood why Merri and the others were so anxious. Valery had forbidden any outside agency to come in and do any actual polling—he said the university was still an institute of higher learning and he didn’t want to turn it into a “media circus”—but he couldn’t stop reporters from the outside world from coming in and talking to students, and drawing conclusions based on anecdotal evidence. And by the time the week of the referendum finally arrived, all the reports agreed that the campus was pretty much evenly split between the pro-witch faction and the pro-status quo.
Merri, Darius, and Gerrid were convinced that this was bad news—that there were a number of students who claimed to be voting to keep the university science-based, but who had only said that for show because they had friends or colleagues in the science camp. Everyone knew that there were students who, late at night, fraternized with the witches and got very cozy with them in ways they’d never dream of admitting to in the harsh light of day. “You see them all the time,” Gerrid said with a derisive curl to his lip; “these laughing guys and giggling girls, going to the witches’ quarters to have their fortunes told, or see their destiny in a crystal ball, like it’s the biggest joke in the world—and then coming out an hour later with this moony, awestruck look on their faces.” Darius and Merri made disgusted noises in agreement; but I couldn’t; after all, I was one of the first to visit the witches for just that purpose, and I’d come out exactly like he said: full of hope and confusion and halfway in their camp without even knowing it.
That was one of the reasons I’d been so grateful that my friendship with Donald and Ntombi flourished just when it did; because if I’d been left on my own, I don’t know if I could have resisted going back to the witches—begging for another glimpse of my family, of my old life on Parallel 24, to determine whether it was really still there waiting for me or not. And I knew if I ever saw it again—even the haziest vision of my mother, or my home—I’d believe it; I already ached to believe it. I’d fall right into that pit of desperate desire, and it would feed off me till my rational self—never the strongest part of me—was completely consumed.
And yet Donald and Ntombi couldn’t entirely distract me from the atmosphere on campus. They were both big egotists and demanded tremendous amounts of attention, which I was happy to give them; but even they lost interest in their own fabulousness when the witches appeared on the commons. Usually, Jocasta Foxglove and her delegation kept to their quarters—which had been hastily set up for them at Asimov Residence Hall, a student dorm that had been empty for over five years. But every so often a little luster of them would emerge, billowing out in their bright colored robes, and almost float across the commons in what seemed to be a swirl of incense and tinkling chimes. Even I still paused to gawk at them.
“It’s very cagey of them,” Merri observed once, while we watched from the window of our room as a quartet of witches swept past the building. “When Valery and the U.N. task force set the referendum date for November thirtieth, I thought it was a stroke of genius; I thought the witches would use those added months to keep banging away at the student body about how great they were, until everyone got tired and bored of them, and voted against them when the time came. Instead they’ve almost completely withdrawn from sight, so that after five weeks not only is everyone not bored with them, they seem more mysterious and exotic than ever. I completely underestimated them.”
And now it was just three days to the referendum, and the campus was half mad for all things witchy. A lot of girls—even a fair number of guys—had adopted the delegation’s fashion sense, and went around campus in full-length robes decorated with arcane symbols whose meaning they didn’t even know. It made Merri and Gerrid want to tear their hair out; Darius, too, if he’d had hair.
So I had a big surprise for me when I returned to the dorm that evening, after having left Ntombi and Donald for the day. (We’d been at the pond on the west side of campus, feeding shredded hamburger buns to the mallard ducks…something we now did every afternoon in the hope of delaying their flight south for the winter, because—it’s silly, I know—we said we’d miss them.) I expected to find the room empty as usual, and looked forward to having a nap before getting in a little studying and then grabbing something quick for dinner.
But when I opened the door, there was Merri at her desk, writing madly on her laptop, with an empty bag of potato chips, an array of crumbs, and a drained liter jug of cola on the desk. She’d clearly been at it for some time.
“What’s going on?” I asked, dropping my backpack onto my bed. “You’re not already bingeing for finals, are you?” Final exam week wasn’t till mid-December, and given the excitement of the referendum, almost no one had thought that far ahead.
Merri looked over her shoulder at me, and I could see that her eyes were bright with what looked like a blend of excitement and frenzy. “You’ll never believe what’s happened.”
I was slightly alarmed by the high pitch of her voice; it sounded like she was just a hair away from screaming. “What
?” I asked, and I sat on the edge of her mattress.
She swiveled in her chair so she could face me. “A week ago, Valery sent the Parallel 17 delegation a proposal that just before the vote, each side should make its final case at an assembly on the commons. With press invited. We thought for sure they’d say no—they’ve said no to everything we’ve suggested for the past two months—but just this morning Jocasta Foxglove sent him a hand-delivered message saying yes.”
I gave a slow whistle. “That’s…unexpected.”
She ran her fingers through her hair distractedly. “Right? It gives me hardly any time to prepare.”
“You?” I said, raising my eyebrows in surprise.
She nodded. “We—that is, Valery and me—and of course Darius and Gerrid—we figured I was best for the job. After all, Valery is the president; he has skin in the game, if you know what I mean. Gerrid has some image problems…”
I snorted a laugh. Gerrid was, after all, widely believed to be a vampire; but even those who did know better were likely to be put off by his pallor, his hooded way of bearing himself, and his voice, which managed to be both faint and gravelly.
“What about Darius?” I asked. After all, he was famously called the Living Doll because of his irresistible good looks (which were sculpted for him by his android manufacturer; hence the double meaning of “doll”).
“He was our first thought, too,” Merri said. “But the trouble with Darius is, sometimes when he’s talking, you can kind of…lose track of what he’s saying.” She blushed a little, but she didn’t have to; I knew exactly what she meant. I could remember many times when Darius had been speaking to me with great urgency and intensity, and I felt myself mesmerized by him; only to find, when he finished, that I couldn’t quite remember anything he’d said. It was just so soothing to watch him speak. He was able to win you over, all right; but only for as long as he was right in front of you.
“So anyway,” Merri said, “that leaves only me.” Suddenly realizing what she’d said, she looked up and said, “Oh—I didn’t mean—”
I waved my hands at her. “No, no,” I said; “don’t apologize! I’m the last person in the world who should be talking to an assembly about anything. I’d freeze up.”
She gave me a dubious look. “But—you go out into arenas all the time! You perform before thousands of people!”
“That’s different. That’s for games…like wrestling matches, or lion-taming. I can easily smack down an opponent in front of a crowd; I just can’t talk.”
She laughed, and a little of the frantic tension went out of her. This was the warmest, easiest conversation we’d had in weeks.
But I didn’t want to distract her from her task, which was hugely important. So I said, “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“If you wouldn’t mind,” she said, twisting around to grab her laptop, “can you listen to what I’ve got so far and tell me what you think?”
“Of course,” I said, and I leaned back on my elbows, getting comfortable. While she scrolled back to the top of her speech, I said, “Who’s speaking for the witch side?”
She shrugged. “Jocasta Foxglove herself, I imagine.”
I felt a little shiver of anxiety for Merri; after all, I had firsthand knowledge of how uncannily persuasive Jocasta could be. “Who goes first?” I asked, hoping to hear it was the witches; that would give Merri an opportunity to pull everyone out of Jocasta’s thrall.
“We’re going to flip a coin,” Merri said, settling the laptop on her knees and preparing to read.
I scoffed. “They’ll just put a whammy on it. You’ll lose.”
She laughed again. “I’m so glad you’re here, Fabia,” she said; and suddenly I remembered how much I loved her.
Something else occurred to me as well. I recalled that this was not, in fact, the Merri I had shared so many adventures with during freshman year—the Merri who had saved the entire multiverse by sacrificing her life. This was that Merri’s replacement—a Merri from another parallel, who had come here after her counterpart died, and tried to live up to that tremendous reputation.
And this, I now saw, was her opportunity: this was her chance to be like that other Merri—her chance to be a hero in her own right, by winning this battle.
In my heart, I set Donald and Ntombi aside for a while. I would, I vowed, do everything I could to help her.
“Let’s hear what you’ve got,” I said.And it was essentially the same address Merri read to me that night, with just a few tweaks and alterations that I (and later Darius and Gerrid) made, that she read again on the morning of the vote. The sky was overcast and there was a slight drizzle, which dampened the already thin hair around her scalp so that she didn’t look her best, despite Gerrid standing next to her and awkwardly shielding her with his overcoat. After the coin toss—which Merri lost—she waved him away, presumably because she wanted to be as visible as possible to the nearly seven thousand people assembled on the commons. As Jocasta Foxglove (who I was sure had somehow rigged the coin toss) moved to the back of the temporary platform and disappeared under an oversize red umbrella, Merri stepped up to the mic and cleared her throat.
“This morning,” she said, “we vote on a referendum that will determine whether Parallel University—whose mission since its founding has been to gather the knowledge, cultures, and technologies of every parallel Earth and share it equally across the multiverse—will turn over all decisions regarding its curriculum to the representatives from a single parallel, who espouse a single field of study. It’s true that the field of study in question—magic—isn’t currently represented in any programs at the university; that’s because it has not—it cannot—stand up to the scientific method of examination, experimentation, and re-testing of initial conclusions. The practice of magic hinges on tradition and ritual—on belief. We are being asked to choose between active inquiry and passive ceremony…between observation, and observance.
“There is no quantifiable benefit to this change. In fact, quite the opposite; we would be diluting a system of higher learning that has been meticulously crafted over centuries, and which has brought us nearly everything we value. But there is one promised boon which the delegation from Parallel 17 is offering us in return for surrendering our scientific heritage: they have promised to send us home.
“I will give them the benefit of the doubt. I will presume that their intentions are in fact honorable, that their goal is merely to help us, to give us what we most crave and miss: a reconnection with everything that made us who we were, before we came here.
“But their method, whether they mean it to be or not, is manipulative and ultimately cruel. They offer us hope with no guarantee; they insist that we fundamentally change who we are; and in the meantime they refuse to explain, debate, or even discuss the matter. It is simply on the table, to be accepted or refused.
“And we must refuse. I understand how much we all miss our home parallels—our families, our communities, our origins. But we can’t let our emotions betray us; we can’t let ourselves be tricked into thinking that this is our last and only chance to regain what we’ve lost. We even know it’s not; we know there is another science-based method of breaching the Veil—a safe one—and while at present that method isn’t accessible to us, that doesn’t mean it won’t be; and I for one believe it soon will. The existence of Eddie Mason’s Hopper is also of even greater value; because if there’s a second way of traveling between parallels, there is theoretically a third—even a fourth, and a fifth.
“It’s up to us to pursue this line of thinking. It’s our duty; it’s our destiny. It’s what we were made for, and why we are here. We’re thinkers, each and every one of us; we’re men and women of reason, who accept nothing that we can’t understand, that we can’t do or prove or demonstrate ourselves. Faith has its role in our lives; but that role is personal and internal. When faith is brought forward as a means of deciding the course of our lives—when given a higher value than rea
son—it becomes dangerous. In choosing belief over understanding, we give up agency in our lives; we give someone else the power to choose for us, to think for us.
“That isn’t who we are. We’re the finest young minds from eighty-four parallels. If we want to go home, let’s go home. But let’s do it by finding our way there; let’s take the awful situation we’ve been left in and use it as a starting point to better ourselves, to improve, to achieve—not to become submissive, to wait to be given what we want. Let’s earn our way home.
“Thank you for your attention; and thank you for being my colleagues in this great adventure of intellectual and philosophical discovery. I hope we can continue it together for many years to come.”
And with that, she stepped away from the podium and sat down. She looked like a damp little terrier, but in my eyes she was a champion; she had entered an arena and she had thrown down her opponent. The applause for her was genuine and sustained.
I couldn’t imagine how Jocasta Foxglove was going to manage to respond to this obviously heartfelt and passionate speech. I turned my gaze on her now, as she emerged from beneath the red umbrella, which she handed to one of her acolytes who’d been under it with her, and who proceeded at once to fold it up; because—miraculously, it seemed—the moment Jocasta showed her face, the drizzling rain sputtered to a halt, the clouds parted, and sunlight came spilling down like waterfalls of liquid butter.
The effect was immediate and revivifying; everyone in the crowd who held his or her own umbrella now folded it shut as well. It was as though everyone was emerging from some underground bunker onto a bright new landscape.
And then Jocasta spoke into the microphone; and if anything, the honeyed, musical quality of her voice was amplified along with its volume. I felt a tremor of sudden fear.
I was soon to find out how much cause I had.