Parallel U. - Sophomore Year

by Dakota Rusk

  “But see, that’s because this is your quest. Every hero has one, right? From Odysseus right on down the line. There’s an arc to every hero’s journey. And that arc—that quest—always involves a descent into the underworld.”

  I looked over my shoulder at him, not quite believing what I was hearing. “That’s what you call this? We’re in a basement storage room with a damaged skeleton and file cabinets, not the pit of Hades among the spirits of the dead.”

  “It’s metaphorical. The descent into the underworld is the hero’s abandonment of control over his destiny for a higher cause—his submergence into darkness so that he can bring back the light. That’s what you’re doing here. It all fits.”

  He was starting to make sense to me. I didn’t like that it was making me feel better, and grunted noncommittally, then turned my face back to the couch.

  “Also,” he said, “the witches don’t seem to think this is just some boring, overlit, bureaucratic waiting room. They come down here to work their mojo. They recognize the power this place has, just by being underground. It’s got resonance; it means something. Things can happen down here that wouldn’t have half the potency they did in broad daylight…or even under a full moon.”

  I sighed, and rolled around onto my other shoulder so that I could see him better. “You take all this ‘hero’ business seriously, don’t you? You joke about it—giving us code names, and all of that—but you buy into it. You believe in it.”

  “Why shouldn’t I? You keep making me believe it. You people…the things I’ve seen you do. I mean, hello, didn’t you just recently rescue me?”

  “Only because you gave me the means to.”

  “I put a button on a Hopper. You’re the one who pressed it. You’re the one who stepped into the unknown.” He laughed. “Two of you, in fact. You’re so in love with adventure, you even team up with yourself.”

  I felt a little twinge in my chest; these were the words I’d been needing to hear for a long time. Sometimes, it’s how someone else sees you that shows you how you really are—that overrides all your uncertainty and self-doubt.

  “One more week,” I said, turning over again with the intention of taking a nap. “Just seven more days, then I’m leaving this mythic underworld, marching right into Jocasta Foxglove’s office, and holding her out the window by her ankles until she tells me what exactly she’s up to.”

  28

  In fact, it took almost a month.

  By the end of the first week, we were all on high alert, because we knew the witches would by now have discovered Eddie’s escape; we couldn’t anticipate what their response would be. For his part, Valery kept a keen eye on President Foxglove, but told us he detected no crack in the veneer of her outward serenity. If she knew she’d lost Eddie—and of course she must—she was expertly hiding any anxiety it caused her.

  The long wait for something to happen—always being vigilant, always ready to respond with action if need be—took its toll on us; and it was worse for me than anyone else, stuck as I was in the basement with nothing at all to do. Eddie had his Hopper to continue refining and improving, and Valery got him the tools and supplies he needed for the task. “There are a lot of ideas I had while I was locked up by the witches,” he explained from his makeshift work bench, his tiny solder searing an impossibly brilliant pinprick into the room’s filmy fluorescent murk. “I wasn’t able to develop them, because I didn’t want to give them to the bad guys. But now I can work them in.”

  “What, like the time jump?” I asked, lying on a sofa with a loose armrest, which I wobbled with my foot out of sheer boredom.

  “Not so much that. Still a lot of problems to be worked out there. For instance, I’ve only figured out how to jump forward in time.”

  “Isn’t it the same principle, going in either direction?”

  “Same principle, but different impediments. If you jump back, you run into a whole array of paradoxes: the causal paradox, the grandfather paradox, yadda yadda.”

  “Explain,” I said, not really wildly interested but wanting to hear someone talk—even Eddie Mason.

  “Well,” he said, turning off the solder and looking over at me. He was wearing welder’s glasses, which he raised so that they sat atop his head, forcing his hair up into a plume, like a rooster’s comb. I wanted to laugh, but was too bored to manage it. “Imagine you jumped forward an hour into the future; you arrive at a point at which, for the past hour, you haven’t existed, right?”

  “Mm-hm,” I said listlessly.

  “Because of course you haven’t; you’ve made the jump. But then if you jump back an hour, and re-insert yourself into the timeline—anything you do creates a condition in which the future you’ve just visited is no longer a possibility.”

  “But what if,” I said, kicking the broken armrest a little too hard, so that it fell off the sofa entirely and landed on the floor with a thud, “you jump an hour into the future, and when you get there you learn that you have existed in that previous hour—like, maybe, someone says they’ve just seen you out on the commons turning cartwheels.” I thought about turning a cartwheel now, in illustration; but that would have meant getting up. “All you’d have to do is jump back in time, go do those cartwheels, and everything would be okay.”

  Eddie smiled in triumph, like I’d walked into a trap. “That, girlfriend, is called a bootstrap paradox. Because why do you turn those cartwheels? Because you were told you’d done it. So where did the original impulse come from? Whose idea was it? Why did it happen?” He lowered the welder’s glasses again. “If the only reason you’re doing something is to fit into a timeline where you already did it, then you’ve stumbled into a causal loop.” He turned the torch back on, and the tiny plume of flame reappeared. “So…for the moment, only forward jumps.

  “Besides,” he added as he got back to work on the Hopper’s circuit board, “I’m confident that backward travel through time is an impossibility and will never be discovered. In fact, I’m sure of it.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because,” he said, transparently pleased that I was feeding him all the right lines, “if I’m wrong, then where are they? Where are all the time-travelers coming back to see the great events of the preceding centuries? The grassy knoll at the JFK assassination alone would be thick with them.” He paused long enough to shoot me a grin. “I call this Mason’s Law: the proof that travel back through time is and will remain impossible, is the absence of time travelers all around us in the present.”

  “But you just said it was possible.”

  “I said the principles involved are the same. But factor in the potential paradoxes, which are like potholes in the road back, and what you’ve got is basically a self-defeating exercise. Trust me. Boy genius, here.”

  I rolled over on one side. “Fine. Then if not that, what are you adding to the Hopper?”

  He cackled like a mad scientist in a movie. “Oh, this and that. You’ll see, if they pan out. I’m working some super-kooky theorems and projections, here.”

  A few moments later he was hard at work again, having forgotten I was even in the room.

  Ultimately Valery came to my rescue. He declared that my being in hiding was no excuse for shirking my studies. He put together a second-term curriculum for me, fairly close to what I would have chosen for myself, and got me a laptop already loaded with the textbooks. Then four times a week he came down and tested me on my reading, engaged me in debate, and generally made sure I was grasping the material. In fact, he was the best teacher I ever had at Parallel U., possibly because he gave me his undivided attention, and was able to focus on the areas where I was weakest—like anything to do with advanced physics. It wasn’t long before I was grasping things, like quantum entanglement, that had previously made me pull my hair out in frustration.

  Darius and Merri also came down a few times a week to help me with the readings and answer my questions; they’d already been through the course material I was now deali
ng with, and had mastered it easily. They were a big help—not only academically, but also socially; their visits kept me sane. Sometimes they brought the texts being taught by the new faculty from Parallel 17, and we laughed at the absurdity of it all—things like Basics of Banishing and Candle Diagnostics.

  With all this coming and going, we had to be very careful—especially since there was a high probability that at least some of our visitors were being watched. Fortunately Gerrid knew the tunnels so well, he was able to provide maps of different entry and exit points so that Valery, Darius, and Merri wouldn’t run the risk of establishing a traceable travel pattern.

  Gerrid himself hardly ever showed up; apparently his broken heart was most comfortable in solitude. I felt so much for him, and would have loved to give him what comfort I could; but I respected his desire to be alone.

  It wasn’t all classwork and social visits, though; Eddie and I kept up our surveillance work, and managed to come across four more ritual sacrifices (the poor cats must now have been nearly entirely wiped out). From what we could tell, the rites were increasing both in frequency and intensity, which could only mean something was getting ready to break. Unfortunately, Eddie’s rudimentary Celtic wasn’t good enough to fully comprehend the chants and incantations…though it seemed clear that they were summoning spells, probably for Azathoth, whose name was invoked increasingly often.

  “I have to ask,” said Valery at one point, “why don’t we just let her get on with it? I take it that we’re all in agreement that there’s no such entity—no sleeping dreamer whose return to consciousness will evaporate all creation. So why do we care if she pursues this ridiculous, superstitious business to its inevitable, ineffectual end?”

  “Because,” said Darius, “she’s already tried to kill at least once in pursuit of it.” He gave me an appreciative look.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Olwen was the one who actually came at me with a knife; but she had to be doing it at Jocasta’s command. And also,” I continued, with a nod to Eddie, “remember how we heard High Priest Peragon on Parallel 17 call her ‘a dangerous woman, capable of any atrocity.’ ”

  “And that’s from a guy who hunts down actual human beings with bloodhounds, then ritually sacrifices them,” Eddie added. “So his definition of ‘atrocity’ is probably in the you-don’t-really-wanna-know category.”

  The break finally came in mid-February. There’d been a lot of pressure on President Foxglove to begin what was now called the Journey Home program—“J.H.,” the students almost immediately dubbed it. Jocasta had insisted that the program commence at the end of March, during the vernal equinox; this was when the semester’s first quarter ended, and she’d be able to reward the students with the highest grades with the first trips home.

  But the protestors weren’t willing to wait that long. It was clear that my video had bought Jocasta time; just not as much as she’d counted on. If travel between the parallels was possible—and it clearly was—then the students wanted it implemented immediately. They’d voted on a referendum for just this purpose, and they weren’t at all happy that they were still here, restricted to campus, their worlds reduced to the perimeters of their dorm rooms, when the entirety of their home parallels awaited them.

  The standoff between the students and the President was a particularly fraught one, a tinder box just waiting for a match; and in fact this was almost literally what happened, when on a night in mid-February, someone—it was never learned who—again set fire to the administration building, torching a lot of the structure that had only recently been restored. Once again the president’s office managed to escape major harm (other than smoke and water harm), but as Valery noted, it must still, from Jocasta’s point of view, be striking a bit close for comfort.

  “So she’s moved up the date,” he continued excitedly, “if only to prevent an escalation in the violence. And she doesn’t look at all happy about it; those cracks in her veneer I’ve been waiting to see? They’re the size of crevasses.”

  It seemed probable that this was related to the basement rituals we’d seen, and to the plan to waken Azathoth and expunge the entire time-space continuum from existence.

  We just had no idea how.

  “One thing seems certain,” Merri said: “the students who get selected to go home? They’re probably in some kind of danger. They almost have to be.”

  “How many will there be?” asked Darius.

  “Seven,” said Eddie before Valery could answer.

  Valery lowered his glasses and looked at him; everyone looked at him.

  “That’s correct,” he said. “How did you know that?”

  Eddie shrugged. “Simple. During the time I was their prisoner, I made the witches seven Hoppers—roughly one a month. One of them later fell into Fabia’s hands, and eventually got destroyed; but they also had my original, which they took from me, so they still have seven total.”

  “So in other words, they can’t send more than seven students home at one time,” Valery said, shoving his glasses back up his nose. “Which explains why Jocasta Foxglove is in such a state about having to go forward. She was obviously planning on having more Hoppers.”

  “Which she’ll never get, now. This one here,” he said, holding up the Hopper he’d been retrofitting with his new tech, “would’ve been a replacement eighth; but I’ve got it, and she doesn’t.”

  “Why is that so important?” asked Merri. “What difference does the number of Hoppers make?”

  No one could answer.

  “Well,” I said, “even if we don’t know, it still seems clear the number has to be zero. We can’t let any students get taken anywhere, as long as there’s a possibility they’ll be hurt.”

  “How can we possibly stop it?” asked Valery.

  “Maybe we can’t,” Eddie said, “but we can do the next best thing.”

  Once again, we all looked at him. “Which is what?”

  “I imagine there’ll be another lottery, right?” he said, slouching back in his chair like he had everything all figured out. Sometimes you wanted to hit this kid, even when he was astounding you. “There’ll have to be, since she won’t yet have the GPAs to base the distribution on merit.”

  “She could use last semester’s GPAs,” Darius suggested.

  Eddie shook his head. “That’s rewarding students who performed well before she took over—when the curriculum was all still science-based. It makes more sense simply to have another drawing.” He turned to Valery. “Convince her to run it digitally this time—it shouldn’t be too hard, she’s already sufficiently distracted to put up too much of a fight—and I’ll hack into the program and fix it so that we pick the winners.”

  Valery blinked. “And who would those be?”

  Eddie pointed around the room. “Living Doll. Magnetic Girl. Warrior Nun. Daimon Seed. Overbite Boy. That’s five right there. We just need two more.”

  Valery shook his head. “You’re forgetting—you and Fabia are in hiding; you’re not even officially here. And for that matter, you’re not even a student here. And even if you were, you can’t be sent to your home parallel, because this is your home parallel.”

  Eddie blew out his cheeks in dismissal. “Fine. So a boy genius can’t miss a few details now and then?”

  “As for these three,” Valery said, gesturing at Merri, Darius, and Gerrid, “it’ll raise suspicion through the roof if suddenly their names come up when they’re all still on record as claiming the process can’t even work.”

  “But there’s Fabia’s video,” Merri said; “we can say it changed our minds.”

  “No one will believe that. There was enough of a frost between you three and Fabia in the months before she went home, that it would be entirely unconvincing.” He saw our shocked faces and said, “I’m sorry to say it; but it’s true. Everyone on campus knows you had a falling out.”

  Merri balled her fists and hit the arms of her chair. “I hate being so freaking visible,” she said.
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  “Occupational hazard of the superhero game,” said Eddie with a little purr of sympathy.

  “I’ll still do it,” said Gerrid.

  All heads swiveled toward him; this was the first time he’d spoken all night. We’d almost forgotten he was there…he usually didn’t even attend these little irregular strategy sessions, and had only come to this one at Valery’s.

  “You?” Merri asked, her voice suddenly on edge. “But—but you—”

  “It won’t look suspicious if only one of us enters—or wins,” he said. “And frankly, I’d like to go home. If there’s a chance that this is on the level, then I’m willing to take it. And if in fact it’s some nefarious plot, then I’m better equipped to fight it than some random student. So consider me the first winner.”

  There was a small, very turbulent silence; I could sense nearly everyone biting their tongues. Before anyone could say anything he or she might regret, I spoke up.

  “I think I might have some candidates for the second and third spots,” I said. “My friends Ntombi and Donald; they’re both strong, brave, and trustworthy. And least I trust them…with my life, if need be.”

  Valery nodded. “Well…all right. Worth considering. But how are we to approach them?”

  “I’ll talk to Ntombi; she already knows I’m here, remember?” Though I hadn’t heard from her in so long, I wasn’t certain how she still felt about me. I’d just boasted about her bravery, but the fact that she’d essentially made herself scarce since we observed that ritual made me wonder if she might not be the lioness I was making her out to be. “And then she’ll talk to Donald.”

  “Can’t you do that?” Darius asked.

  Part of me—the larger part—wanted to; oh, how I wanted to. But I realized revealing to Donald that I’d been on campus all this time would involve too much explanation and justification—too many potential hurt feelings—and everything might go terribly wrong. It was better if he thought he was being recruited by Darius and the others. He’d probably be flattered; like Ntombi, he’d always been in awe of my original friends.