by Dakota Rusk
I cleared my throat and said, “Actually, they’re not just sending someone home; they’re escorting them. Whoever it is will be accompanied by a Parallel 17 representative, who will take some video of the student in their home parallel and bring it back to show the rest of us. That’s the kind of thing that can’t possibly be faked; and once everyone sees it, they ought to be satisfied to wait an additional few weeks till Jocasta Foxglove can start her program of home-leave visits based on grade-point averages.”
“I hadn’t heard of that,” Ntombi said. “You have to earn a trip home?”
“Not exactly,” I said, leaning back on my elbows so that the sun could shine on my face. “Apparently it’s a pretty involved process, getting someone across the Veil; there’s a lot of mystical prep work. So they can only do a few at a time. She doesn’t want a huge exodus of students all at once, anyway; if everyone who wanted to go left at the same time, the campus would be empty. So she needed a filter, and that’s what she came up with. First privilege to the academic all-stars.”
Donald shook his head again. “It should be for merit beyond that. You’re a campus hero. You should be top of the list.”
I blushed a little at the compliment; and to cover up my embarrassment, I played tough.
“It can’t be me,” I said. “My parallel’s not even there anymore. It was wiped out by the Terminus Engine. I barely escaped with my life. You know that. I’ve told you a dozen times.”
He just grinned, and the blade of grass between his teeth flicked up and down. “You’ve also told me about your vision,” he said. “In your head, you saw your parallel still there. And the witches say it’s still there. I think I know you well enough to know you won’t be satisfied till you put it to the test.”
The idea that he was so confident he knew me gave me little butterflies in my stomach; and I’m not the kind of girl who likes butterflies. I tried to squash them by getting even tougher with him. “Maybe you’re right; but I won’t be putting it to the test anytime soon. My grade-point average is just middling—maybe a little below that—so it’ll be a long wait for me.”
“There’s the lottery,” he said, giving me a little wink. “One chance in six thousand. And you’re a lucky girl.”
“Actually, zero chances,” I said, sitting back up again. “I’m not entering.”
Both Donald and Ntombi seemed shocked. “But you have to!”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t. I’ve made up my mind. I’m still conflicted about this whole thing….the delegation, the referendum—magic, basically.” I got to my feet and brushed the dirt off my knees. “My friends—my other friends—fought hard against all of that,” I continued. “I’m not going to betray them by suddenly embracing it, like it’s all okay now. Just sweep everything aside because of some whim that my home parallel might still be there. ” And while they stared at me in stupefied disbelief, I added to myself, No matter how much I want to.Donald left us afterwards to meet some friends for a game of field hockey. I walked Ntombi back to her dorm, and from the moment we were alone it was clear she was screwing up her courage to say something. I confined myself to small talk, to give her the space she needed.
Finally she said, “Fabia, are you really not going to put your name in this lottery thing?”
I looked at her from the corner of my eye. She seemed nervous; she kept her eyes on her feet as she walked. “I’m really not,” I said.
“Then I’m not either.”
I was so astonished that I came to a dead halt; she took a step and a half more before she did the same.
“Ntombi!” I cried. “You can’t let me influence a decision like that!”
She smiled. “You didn’t influence me, sweet friend; you just gave me the resolve to act on my desires.” She took a deep breath, then released it. “The truth is, I don’t want to go home.” She looked me hard in the eye. “Not ever.”
I was so amazed I couldn’t speak; but I didn’t need to. She plunged right into an explanation as we resumed our walk.
“When I first got here, as a freshman, I hated it,” she said, gesturing at everything around us. “All the noise and disorder, and people walking by me not even looking at me, much less showing respect; even bumping into me like I was a piece of furniture. All these common people, swarming around me like flies. I couldn’t wait for the day I could go back where everyone bows to me, and I can live my life in peace and silence and luxury.”
She was silent for a few paces; when she continued, it was in a lower voice. “Then the Terminus Engine became too dangerous to use, and I was stuck here. I thought I’d die from the indignity of it. It was agony to be stuck in this madness…like being trapped in a hornet’s nest. When the witches came and said they could get us out of it, I was overjoyed; anything, any chance to go back home.
“But now,” she concluded, as we approached her dorm, “when the opportunity is finally here—not just a remote concept, but a reality; a prize to be won—I find I don’t want it.” She looked at me, her eyes big and pleading. “When you mentioned the highest-ranking students going home first, my first impulse was to go over my grades in my head, and hope to find some flaw in them, something that made them less to be proud of than I remembered.” She stopped and took my hand. “Fabia, I don’t want to go back home! It’s lonely there, and boring, and there's no one to talk to—my sisters, yes, but they’re all in the same situation. Only it’s worse for me now, because I’ve seen a world outside, and they haven’t; I know there’s something better. I won’t be able not to show it, and they’ll hate me for it.” She squared her shoulders and squeezed my fingers. “I want to keep studying, Fabia. I want to become a real, practicing astronomer. My grandfather, the king…the only reason he let me come here at all is for the bragging rights—having one of his family enrolled at Parallel U. But he has no respect for learning and less for me. If I go back, he’ll stick me in a wing of the palace with a telescope on my balcony and expect me to be satisfied.”
She released my hand, took a deep breath, and stuck her jaw out defiantly. “I’m not going back. There’s nothing there for me but a barren old age, among a lot of other redundant royal women.”
“I thought you had a marriage arranged for you! With that twelve-year-old!”
She sneered. “That’s the fourth marriage that’s been arranged for me since I was eight. They never actually seem to come to anything. The political situation changes, my grandfather breaks the old arrangement and pairs me up with someone new, to cement some new alliance. And the engagement lasts as long as the alliance does, which is never very long.” She sighed. “All the women in my family have had multiple fiancés. Meanwhile all the men get married and sire children, including more girls, which has the effect of making the older girls redundant. I have seven aunts; all still single, all still living at the palace, resentful and bitter and taking it out on each other. I’d rather die.” Her eyes bored into mine. “I mean it, Fabia. I’d rather die.”
I wanted to argue with her—tell her to reconsider, not to let something as precious as family slip away from her.
But then I realized—as I’d done freshman year, with Merri, and Darius, and Gerrid—that family was where you found it. And if Ntombi had found it with me, that was an honor I didn’t dare disparage.
I also realized that it wasn’t up to me to make Ntombi what she was. And what she was, was a champion. That’s what had made us rivals; and that’s what now made us sisters.The administration gave students three days to enter the lottery. Since this was done electronically, over a website, that was more than enough—all it took was one click—but the added time allowed for Jocasta Foxglove and her retinue to return (I swear one morning I woke up and could smell the incense on the air) and for the university tech team to run a few trials on the random-draw program. Even so, it was still more time than was strictly required; and it wasn’t till I was heading to the gym one day, strolling across a quiet, frost-limed campus swirling with the first faint s
now flurries, that it occurred to me why so much time had been allowed.
There were no more demonstrations, there was no more unrest; no tension in the air, no sense of trouble ready to boil over. Everywhere I looked I saw contented, smiling faces; and that was because everyone was living in a story. It was the middle of the story, and the ending was, “Then I went home.” We were all suspended in a narrative of hope. The only thing that could dispel it was the actual lottery drawing.
And I realized that I myself had been living in a similar state of arrested narrative. My story began with the dream I’d had of my home still being there. And it wouldn’t end until I was face to face with either confirmation of that vision, or proof that it was never anything more than smoke and mirrors.
In other words, all my hopes rested on the witches of Parallel 17 showing proof they could do what they’d promised.
My original friends didn’t enter their names, of course; not even Darius, and it had been his idea. They viewed it simply as a means of pacifying the student body, and additionally of exposing Jocasta Foxglove. Because—and I don’t know why this surprised me—none of them, Darius included, thought she could actually follow through on the lottery’s promise.
“She can’t transcend the Veil,” Merri said with a sneer. “That was a bluff, and now we’ve called it. She’ll be revealed as the charlatan she is.”
“And then maybe,” Gerrid said, flicking his fingers at some dusty text on animism he’d had to read through for the next day’s advisory board meeting, “we won’t have to endure any more garbage like this.”
Darius, as always, was the voice of reason. “Jocasta Foxglove wouldn’t have agreed to the lottery if she thought it would be bad for her,” he said. “Whatever’s going to happen, she’s already anticipated it and figured out a means of making it serve her own ends.” He turned the page of his own “homework” book, a creaky old treatise on mystic uses of minerals and gemstones. “The sole advantage for us, is that by seeing her response we’ll know her better; we’ll have more information on how she operates. Which will help us strategically.”
“Strategically, how?” I asked. I didn’t often interrupt them these days; their experiences on the advisory board seemed to have drawn them more tightly together, and even when the four of us were, as now, casually loafing around the dorm, I felt like a fourth wheel. “I mean, correct me if I’m wrong,” I continued, “but Parallel 17 won the referendum; the university is theirs by anyone’s terms.”
“Unless they cheated,” said Merri. “Unless they lied to get their way. In which case, we’re justified in taking it back.”
I suddenly knew—just like that; in one of those psychic flashes Darius credited human beings with being so prone to—that they’d already had more than a few discussions about how that “taking it back” might be accomplished.
I felt my face burn with shame; they hadn’t confided in me, hadn’t included me in their plans. Was it simply because they were more often together as a threesome lately, and it just wasn’t convenient to wait until they next saw me before broaching the subject?
Or was it because they didn’t trust me? Because they’d grasped, in a psychic flash of their own, that I was still conflicted—my heart and my mind in opposite corners, each shifting its loyalty in contradiction to the other, till not only did I have no center, no grounding, but the world around me seemed to spin so bewilderingly, I could scarcely make sense of it anymore?By the day of the lottery drawing, the weather had dramatically turned. It was now cold enough to ice over the windows at night and when I went outdoors, my breath came in little steam-locomotive puffs. It was too frigid, even at noon—the official start time for the assembly—to hold it on the commons; so the event was moved to Gleick Auditorium, whose capacity was only five thousand. There was a crush to get in, and the spillover crowd had to be content to stand in the lobby and in the stairwells, and even on the freezing portico.
The stage was set with a simple podium, with a single row of chairs arrayed behind it. These were soon filled by a handful of members of both the administration and the Parallel 17 delegation, with Valery and Jocasta taking up the rear. I’d expected to see Merri and the others on the stage as well; but I suppose they were merely students, however noteworthy. Even so, they must be up front somewhere; whereas I had only just been lucky enough to grab some seats midway back, which I’d saved for Donald and (arriving late as usual) Ntombi.
Valery began the proceedings by taking the mic. “Good morning,” he said; then he corrected himself. “Afternoon, I mean.” Then he paused and said, “Well, it’s actually only just noon, so I can’t really say afternoon…” This was classic Valery—as was the left pocket of his jacket, which was flapping out like a dog’s tongue. He was a fiercely intelligent and wildly ethical man, and I trusted him with my life; but sometimes I wondered how he got through an average day without stepping into an open manhole.
He hoisted his arm and stared at his wristwatch for a while; in fact, for so long that people in the audience started to titter nervously. What was he doing…? Then he suddenly said, “There we are—one minute after twelve,” and he looked back up at the crowd and said, “Good afternoon.”
There was a roar of laughter at this, which seemed to confuse him. I knew him, and was well aware that he really didn’t mean to be funny and wasn’t certain how he was managing it. After a moment, he shrugged it off and continued.
“We’re going to keep this short and sweet,” he said. “We only have two items of business today, and there’s really only one most of you even care about. All the same, we’ll start with the first; which is that the semester break is now upon us, and that means I have officially concluded my term as President of the university. As many of you know, this was an office I neither sought nor desired, and though I have many differences with Jocasta Foxglove—many, many differences— ” More laughter here. “—I am very happy to turn my chair over to her, and I wish her every success in it. Certainly her recent international junket on behalf of the university was a great success, proving her to be a public-relations wizard and a fundraising titaness. All I can say is, for someone who despises industrial technology, she seems awfully at home on a jet.” More laughter; though the smile on Jocasta’s face hardened visibly, like quick-dry cement. “In conclusion, I hope that despite our conflicting values and philosophies, she will call on me to serve the university in any capacity I can, in the spirit of fellowship, camaraderie, and the eternal, inextinguishable exchange of ideas. Students, faculty members, friends, I thank you all; and I ask you to welcome Jocasta Foxglove.”
He turned away from the podium—in the wrong direction, so that he had to double back, almost bumping into Jocasta, who had risen majestically, like a phoenix, and stood now implacably in his way, so that he had to scoot around her like a small dog. It was not a dignified exit from his official duties. But I’m pretty sure he didn’t much care.
Jocasta—whose gown was a shade of blue so saturated you almost fell into it if you looked at it too hard—stepped up to the microphone and said, “My thanks to Valery Krovstopkin for that characteristically charming introduction…and also for his devotion and hard work in the office of president. He has earned our respect, just as he has earned the love which, as I have so often witnessed, you all bear for him. I will be humbly grateful if I can do but half as well.” Her smile brightened and she seemed to relax a bit—to unclench. “And now the second and final item on our agenda: the drawing of the lottery winner.” An old-fashioned wire drum was rolled out, filled with bits of paper and with a hand-crank at one end. “We are aware that the winner could simply have been chosen electronically and texted to all of you in your seats; but as you may have heard, we were insufficiently confident that this method could not be tampered with. And also, we thought, as long as we’d all be here together, why not engage in a bit of theater? It’s something you’ll learn over time, as our ways are integrated into the curriculum: ritual is more than mere show.
It’s also energy—process—a journey. And very often the journey is as important as the destination.”
I frowned. Once again, Jocasta was making me feel things—accept things—that I couldn’t quite understand. I was certain that if Donald or Ntombi had asked me right then to explain what she’d just said, I couldn’t have done it.
Jocasta gestured toward the wings and said, “I’d like to welcome our returning student, Rowella Ravencroft, to do the honors…My dear? Will you come up and select the name of the student who will be the first of those long stranded here to be sent, finally and with all our very best wishes, home?”
Rowella dutifully mounted the stage and gave a little wave as she crossed it—a wave to us, which was rather embarrassing. People craned their necks to see us—to pinpoint where Rowella’s famous friends were seated. Once again I was aware of standing out—of being too prominent in this place, among these people—and wasn’t very sure I deserved it.
Never mind, I thought; in just a few seconds, no one would be looking at me anymore. All attention would be on the lucky winner.
Rowella turned the crank of the drum, and all the little papers inside danced and jumped and spun. Then she stopped, unlatched the door to its interior, reached inside, and drew out a single slip of folded paper. She opened it and looked at it.
“Have you read the name?” Jocasta asked.
Rowella nodded.
“Will you share it with us, please?”
Rowella held it high above her head, and dramatically called out a name.
An impossible name. I knew immediately I’d misheard it. Something in my innermost psyche was plugging up my ears, it seemed. Stupid, to be so vulnerable to emotion, to petty egocentrism.
But then everyone turned and applauded—and Ntombi was hugging me and crying—and I knew that even though it was impossible, it had apparently happened.
The name Rowella had called out was, “Fabia Terentia.”