“Their equation opened the path to this world, but they had no numbers to take them back to Earth again, and they were dismayed beyond all telling to realize that they were here too early by many, many years. Time is not always aligned between dimensions, it seems, and not enough had passed for us, or perhaps too much had passed for them.” Kenneth shook his head. “The heartless ones set themselves to working the equations that would let them travel onward, and my grandfather began preparation for the war to come. He took three mates from among our kind, calling them his wives, and fathered many children, all of whom he taught what was to come, and that preparing our people to resist would be our sacred duty. He taught us how to recognize the people he called ‘cuckoos,’ who differed from his heartless ones because they had no mercy, no compassion, and no eternity.”
Eternity? I asked Mark.
I think he means soul, said Mark.
Ah. Lots of people think cuckoos don’t have souls, and they like to share that belief, loudly, because in their eyes, it explains the way some of us behave. Of course, we do terrible, awful, unforgiveable things! We’re soulless monsters! Of course, it’s fine to kill us when we get in your way! It’s not murder if we don’t have souls! Never mind that even my dead aunts don’t know whether the soul actually exists, or what it would look like if it did; it’s a convenient excuse, tied into centuries of religious dogma and self-justifications. And now here it was in a whole new dimension, one that had yet to reveal its religious leanings, if it even had them.
“She,” Kenneth pointed to me, “is Johrlac, as they were Johrlac. He,” and he pointed to Mark. “is not. You harbor a cuckoo among your kind, and we will do you the great and glorious favor of removing it for you.”
He snapped his fingers, and the strangers were suddenly in motion, surrounding Mark in a circle of bristling polearms and visible aggression. Annie leapt to her feet, hands already burning. Kenneth blinked at her, impressed.
“Get the fuck away from him, he’s ours!” she snarled.
“He may have convinced you of such, sorcerer, but I assure you, he is no such thing,” said Kenneth. “He is a monster walking like a man, a hunter in the night, and he has not been tamed. We will remove him for everyone’s benefit.”
“You know, where we come from, people call incubi like me, and like your grandfather, and like you probably, if you inherited anything from him beyond a decent grasp of English, monsters,” said Artie. “Humans like to dismiss anything that isn’t exactly like them as monstrous. It’s ridiculous, it’s cruel, and it’s unfair. Get your people to stand down.”
James stood more slowly. I was too far away to tell, but from the way the grubs on the ceiling above him began to shuffle uncomfortably to the sides, I was willing to bet the temperature of the surrounding air had started to drop precipitously.
“Sorcerers,” said Kenneth, with thoughtful approval. “We have your kind among us, and one of the humans who traveled here before was a sorcerer.”
The fire in Annie’s hands went out. “Really?” she asked. “What was his name?”
“It was one of the women,” said Kenneth. “She called and twisted the wind like it was a woven thread, and threw it where she so desired. She said the power of our dimension was stronger than her own, because something in her world had been draining their magic for generations.”
“The crossroads,” said Annie. “They’re not a problem anymore.” She slumped slightly, wilting.
I could understand why. She’d hoped, for a moment, that we had a new lead on where Grandpa Thomas had gone, a new direction we could tell Grandma Alice to follow. And instead we had one more dead end, one more avenue that had closed itself off before it could properly open.
“Her name was Betsy,” continued Kenneth. “She left with the others. All of them left, save the one Johrlac who did not survive the mathematical working to open their new doorway.”
I straightened. “What do you mean?”
“Uh, guys? Still being menaced here,” said Mark. “If you nice people could all lower your stabbing-sticks, I would really appreciate it.”
“Stand them down,” said Annie, her hands reigniting. “We’re leaving, too, and we’ll take him with us when we go.”
Kenneth sighed, saying something in his own language. The others stepped back, lowering their polearms. They didn’t feel happy about it.
Feeling . . . “Incubi are empaths,” I said. “They feel the emotions of others. Artie’s half-Incubus, and he can feel what other people are feeling.”
“Whether I want to or not,” muttered Artie.
“Can you feel other people’s emotions?” I pressed, eyes on Kenneth.
Kenneth stiffened, looking obscurely as if he’d been caught doing something wrong. “We do not intrude on the minds around us so,” he said. “That is the place of mind-speakers, not Incubi.”
“Incubi aren’t mind-readers,” I said. “Neither are Succubi, their female equivalents. But you can’t help what you feel. Do you feel other people’s feelings?”
Reluctantly, Kenneth nodded. “I do,” he admitted. “Not as strongly as my mother did, but I cannot help myself. It has been an endless source of shame for me.”
Interesting that empathy, and not sex pheromones, were what he considered shameful. I wondered whether he would have felt that way if his culture hadn’t been exposed to Johrlac on a cuckoo-hunting expedition. That’s not going to be the sort of first encounter that leaves you with warm feelings toward any psychics you encounter later. Although his people had psychics of their own, which made things more complicated.
It’s impossible for cultures to meet without impacting each other. Even if they come at things from a position of perfect equality, there are going to be bits and pieces left behind. In this case, the incubus who’d started this whole thing had left a lot more than a few prejudices and a family recipe: he’d left literal genetic material, tying these people permanently to his mission. And they still hadn’t been able to stop the cuckoos from breaking open the walls of the world and coming through when the time arrived, dropping an entire college campus on a world that could never have been properly prepared.
“Then try to feel what Mark is feeling,” I said. “See if he’s hostile.”
“Um, right now, feeling pretty hostile,” said Mark. “Just so you know. Not comfortable with any of this, not really in a charitable state of mind.”
“Anger and annoyance feel different than malice,” I said.
Artie turned to look at me. “That’s a pretty narrow distinction for a cuckoo,” he said.
“Yeah, well, my cousin the Incubus and I used to spend afternoons indexing feelings so we’d be able to identify them quickly and know if someone posed a potential threat,” I said. “It was something we could both do when we were needed in the field, without endangering or overexerting ourselves.”
Artie’s cheeks flushed red as he turned his face away, resolutely not looking at me.
Kenneth took a step toward Mark. “I will look at your feelings, if you agree I may,” he said. “And if I am wrong, and you are not here to harm us, I will release you with your companions when they are allowed to go.”
“Wait, we’re prisoners?” asked James.
“You may,” said Mark warily. I couldn’t blame him. Kenneth clearly thought he was humoring us—the feeling was radiating off him so loudly that I didn’t have to make any effort at all to know that—and thought all he was going to find when he opened himself to Mark was a monster.
To be honest, I understood why he had that impression. Mark was even more of an aberration than I was, and if you’d asked me a week ago whether I’d be willing to defend a cuckoo’s motives, I would have laughed and denied it was even a possibility. Kenneth had never met a cuckoo before. He’d met the Johrlac who traveled with his grandfather, though, and I was sure they wouldn’t have had anything nice t
o say about us.
Kenneth stopped an easy five feet from Mark, raising one hand in a beckoning gesture. I blinked. No one else moved, especially not Mark, who looked at Kenneth like a mouse looks at a cat, radiating fear and wariness. Kenneth held that pose for about twenty seconds before lowering his hand and offering Mark a shallow bow.
“I must apologize,” he said. “I find no ill-intent in your feelings, nor desire for revenge or mayhem. You will be free to go with your friends.”
“Again, are we prisoners?” asked James, a little louder.
“Not prisoners, but it is unsafe to walk the world alone when the hunters in the dark roam the fields,” said Kenneth. “We have driven them back as far as we could, but your mound appeared in the middle of their ceded hunting ground, crushing many of their matriarchs, and they are angry.”
I glanced at Greg, who hadn’t been angry when he leapt after us, just hungry and defending his territory from intrusion. “I don’t think they’re angry,” I said. “I think they’re just animals, and it’s not fair to act like them being animals is somehow personal.”
“That may be,” said Kenneth. “But they are still a danger, and does it matter if the thing which devours you means it personally?”
Even I had to admit that it didn’t. Kenneth took a breath.
“You are not prisoners, sorcerer,” he said, to James. “You are our guests, until it is safe to return you to your own mound. Will it remain where it now is forever, do you think?”
“No,” said James. “We need to go home, and we need to take the campus with us if we possibly can. I’m pretty good at research. Do you have any notes from the travelers who came here before us?”
Kenneth radiated a brief, sharp spike of surprise before nodding and saying gravely. “We do.”
* * *
The notes were kept in another, smaller room, the ceiling studded with more of those glowing grubs. We had seen them on the walls as we passed, the locals shying away from Greg, even as he followed me placidly, as tame as it was possible for a mind-controlled giant spider to be. I hoped I’d be able to undo the damage I’d done to his mind when the time came for us to go. If not, maybe I could convince Kenneth and the other locals to let Greg live here with them. Not perfect, but what really was.
Annie gasped as we stepped into the room. Two of the walls were lined with bookshelves, laden with clearly homemade books, their spines stitched with silken thread that looked a lot like spider silk. A third wall had been turned into a primitive chalkboard, paneled in slate and covered in mathematical notation. I drifted toward it, enthralled by the little bits I could understand.
This was Johrlac math. Not the damaged, neutered equations they’d allowed to go with the cuckoos when they were banished, but real Johrlac math, the result of a culture built on spending centuries carefully refining their mathematical magic. I caught my breath as Mark stepped over to join me, both of us staring enraptured at the possibilities in front of us.
“I don’t even know what that does,” he said, gesturing toward a line of numbers and symbols, including several I didn’t recognize. They appeared over and over again across the chalkboard, incorporated into multiple problems. “Do you?”
I squinted at it, starting at the solution and working my way backward. “Brief change to the local laws of physics,” I said finally. “Run that equation and you can invert gravity for a few seconds.”
“So what’s the downside?” he asked.
“Get it wrong and you’ll liquify your lungs.”
“Huh. So probably not the best stupid math trick to start with.”
“Nope.”
Annie and James descended on the bookshelves like intellectual locusts, pulling down books and flipping through them, beginning to argue about their contents in almost the same breath. I smiled. At least they were happy. Looking over my shoulder to Kenneth, I said, “If you can trust us without an escort, this should keep us busy until morning.”
“You truly believe you can return your entire mound to its universe of origin?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Bringing it here required more brainpower than we have left, and I might hurt myself very badly trying to shift it again without all those minds to buttress mine. But it’s worth the attempt. Your dimension doesn’t deserve to have us littering like this, and my dimension deserves to get its children back.”
“Children?”
“The, uh, mound is a place we call a university,” said James, looking up. “A school for ongoing education. We send our adult children to universities to learn how to be better adults. Some of those children were in the mound when it transitioned to your world.”
“Why would any parent allow someone else to have the teaching of their children?” asked Kenneth, sounding confused. “We apprentice only with those we know and trust intimately, and our children do not leave the mound of their parents until they are fully adult and ready for the world. They never need to learn to be ‘better.’”
“Chalk it up to cultural differences,” said Annie. Unlike James, she didn’t look up from the book in her hands, preferring to focus on something she didn’t already know. “Do you have any other intelligent species living in this dimension?”
“There are people by the big river on the other side of the uncrossable forest, which was more permeable once, before the hunters in the dark claimed it as their own,” said Kenneth. “According to my grandmother, who had been there with her own parents in her youth, they were not like us in form or function, and lived most of their lives below the water in harmony with the great snakes, even as we and the mind-speakers share our lives with the patient ones.”
“You mean the mantises?” asked Annie. To get her point across she raised her head and took one hand off the book she was holding, mimicking the stabbing motion of a praying mantis arm.
Kenneth nodded. “My grandfather and his companions called them that as well.”
“Okay, well, you know how these river-people had a different way of living than you do? And so did your grandfather and all the people he brought with him? Those are what’s called cultural differences. Sometimes, the rules are different for different people. Sometimes, what’s rude or cruel or just outright wrong for one person is exactly the way things ought to be done for someone else. And in our dimension, for better or for worse, humans are currently culturally dominant, and we say children who are old enough to be considered adults but have not yet finished learning everything they need to know for successful adult lives should go to school to spend time learning more things, and preparing themselves to become full members of society. Not everyone does it. Some people get by just fine without a university education, or do all their studies remotely, using machines that let them talk across a great distance, or drop out because everyone around them is stupid and they’re tired of pretending to be somebody they’re not. Legally, the people in our mound are adults, but the people back home still think of them as children, and we’re not leaving them behind.”
“They’re not all adults,” I said, still studying the chalkboard. “The cuckoo kids are there, too.”
“There are more cuckoos in our dimension than just this one?” Kenneth’s thoughts darkened, concern and anger rolling off him like storm clouds.
“Oh, we’re here because your grandfather was right,” said Annie. “The cuckoos were planning to make your dimension their next target, and they did, once they finished getting their demonic ducks in a row. It just took longer than his Johrlac friends thought it was going to. I guess they had an overly-optimistic view of how quickly the cuckoos were going to finish sucking our dimension dry. So they forced one of their own through all the instars they needed to make her a queen, and then used the boost that gave her to work the equation they had for travel between dimensions.”
“It was nothing near as elegant as these,” I commented. “The fact that
Earth has such a low magic level compared to this dimension may have been a factor. They needed more oomph before the ritual could even start to work.”
These equations had a full field to tap into. They were designed to be scalpels, not hammers, meant to make smooth, clean cuts that would heal without scarring, open without tearing. We could use this math as the foundation for a clean escape. It wouldn’t be easy. It wouldn’t be painless. And the longer I looked at it, the more I wondered whether it would be something I could survive.
I’ve always been pretty happy to keep living. I like being alive, and Rose and Mary aren’t guarantees for me that existence continues beyond the grave the way they are for everyone else. They represent an afterlife that may not be available to me, and I have things I want to do. I want to solve more unsolvable math problems. I want to find out how long it takes Marvel’s narrative inertia to overwhelm Hickman’s reboot the way it did Morrison’s and return the X-Men to their everlasting status quo.
I want Artie to fall in love with me again. And not in that Disney movie way where he cradles my cooling corpse and confesses that he never really forgot me, he loved me all along, he never wanted to live without me. That’s fine if you’re already thinking about the inevitable Broadway musical, but that’s not my life, and looking at these equations, I could tell my life probably wasn’t going to last much longer.
Do you see what I see? asked Mark silently. He didn’t gesture at the chalkboard, but he did turn to look at me, adding the weight of his physical gaze to his mental one.
I do, I said. There was no point in lying. He hadn’t undergone the royal instar. He couldn’t work the math. That didn’t mean he couldn’t understand it. I cleared my throat, looking back to Kenneth.
“We want to take everything we brought with us back to our own dimension,” I said. “Everything. That includes the cuckoo children. They’re too young to be your enemies, and they’re only here because they were forced to be. They miss their homes and their families.” The ones who still had families, anyway. Most of them were going home as orphans, and might never recover from the trauma of what they’d experienced.
Calculated Risks Page 27