Blue

by Lou Aronica

Chris laughed. “Makes sense?”

  Becky looked up at the ceiling. “Okay, maybe none of this really makes sense. I actually do realize that this whole Tamarisk thing is pretty incredible. But things are really messed up over there. Who knows? Maybe you can come up with something that none of their scientists have come up with.”

  Becky was serious about this. “You want me to go to Tamarisk with you?”

  “I think you need to go.”

  Chris allowed himself to consider the implications of what Becky was saying. She was inviting him to travel with her to another universe. It sounded so ridiculous when he thought of it that way, but wasn’t there some piece of him that had been waiting for this invitation from the moment Becky mentioned her journeys there? Magic is just science we don’t understand yet. Chris couldn’t remember who’d said that, but he had never been someone who believed that physical laws were immutable. He’d always considered the possibility that remarkable—even magical—discoveries were just around the corner. Was he in the midst of participating in one?

  “Is that even possible?” he said tentatively.

  Becky’s expression darkened. “Are you saying you don’t believe I can do this?”

  “I’m saying I’m wondering if I can do this. I don’t know; I kind of assumed you were the only one with a valid passport.”

  Becky considered this notion. “Maybe I am. But I think we have to find out. They need you, Dad.”

  Chris thrilled at the words. “So how do we go about it?”

  Becky laughed, as though surprised by the question. “I don’t have any idea. You’ll try it, though?”

  Chris shrugged. His skin prickled. “Sure, why not? We didn’t have anything planned for tonight anyway.”

  “We have to darken,” Becky said as they sat on her bed.

  “The lights?”

  “The lights are already dark. We have to darken everything. You need to close your eyes and put a blanket over everything that happened today and anything else that might be on your mind.”

  “You do realize it’s going to be a little difficult to avoid thinking about what we’re doing, right?”

  “Try, Dad. I don’t know whether this is going to get us there or not, but I’m sure we’ll never get there without it.”

  Chris closed his eyes. “Darkening sequence initiated.”

  “Traveling to Tamarisk doesn’t require dorky catchphrases.”

  “Sorry.”

  Chris didn’t want to let Becky down. He didn’t want to let himself down. Still, closing his eyes made him think more about what they were doing, not less. He had taken a meditation class when he was in college. Maybe some of the techniques he learned then would be useful. Unfortunately, he didn’t remember any of the techniques he learned then.

  “You’re not darkening,” Becky said disapprovingly.

  “Are you reading my mind?”

  “I don’t need to. You’re fidgeting. You can’t darken and fidget at the same time.”

  Chris took several deep breaths and tried to concentrate on the black behind his eyelids. He held both of Becky’s hands so they wouldn’t be separated in transit. Chris didn’t want to give too much thought to what being separated could mean. Would he wind up in another part of Tamarisk? Maybe he’d wind up in another world entirely, maybe one created by some other girl and her father. For all he knew, this kind of thing happened all the time but no one talked about it.

  Stop thinking. You’re messing up the darkening process. Chris felt his thoughts begin to recede as the blackness got blacker. Then blacker still. Then even blacker. He felt movement now and he thought he saw something that was even blacker than black. The motion nearly caused him to open his eyes.

  With that thought, the movement stopped. Don’t think about the movement—whatever it was. Just let yourself move. A few moments later, the blackness deepened again. Again, Chris felt a pull, but this time he darkened the thought of the pull. The sensation of movement continued for some time. Then it stopped again.

  Chris felt himself suspended, as though someone had left him dangling in midair. He felt nothing other than the blackness around him. For an instant, he saw a face—no, not a face; it was a shape or a visage or something that looked like it had an expression but didn’t have human features. It was there for just a moment, but when Chris searched for it, he couldn’t find it.

  “The journey is an arduous one.”

  The voice was in his head. In his skin. He didn’t say the words himself, but he knew that they didn’t come from outside. Unless that was the way things worked here.

  “You’re telling me,” Chris said. Had he actually spoken or was he learning some new form of communication?

  “There is no gift I can provide to make this easier other than those already provided.”

  “I need to do this. Help me do this.”

  “You don’t need help. The path is open. An arduous journey awaits. Maintain your vision. Expand your vision.”

  Did Becky have a conversation like this every time she went to Tamarisk? Was the voice some kind of gate-keeper? Was Chris supposed to come up with some magic words to let him pass? “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Absorb all resources. Be enriched.”

  As open-minded as Chris believed himself to be, this exchange was getting a little creepy. Why wasn’t he moving anymore? Why couldn’t he feel Becky’s hands?

  Suddenly the visage coalesced. It wasn’t a face. It wasn’t anything Chris had ever seen before and he had no words to describe it. It was will. It was energy.

  And it filled him. Filled him with what, he didn’t know, but all at once, Chris felt lighter and more substantial at the same time.

  “Absorb this and all other resources.”

  Then the visage was gone, leaving only the sensation behind. Chris wasn’t sure what to think, knowing only that he needed to continue to try to get to Tama-risk for Becky. He could feel her hands again. He saw the blacker-than-black path again. He felt the pull.

  Again, however, the movement stopped.

  What am I doing wrong? Damn, I’ll bet Becky really is the only one who can do this.

  “Dad, open your eyes.”

  Chris opened them and squeezed his daughter’s hands. “Sorry, babe.”

  Then he looked around. At the conference room filled with brightly garbed people. At the blackish table made of some kind of stone. Malheur. I’m nearly certain we called it malheur. At the scaly, iridescent material covering the walls. I don’t remember that stuff at all. At the young woman with perfect posture sitting at the head of the table staring at him intently.

  He was in Tamarisk.

  Chris beamed at Becky and squeezed her hands again. This is overwhelming. I mean, I believed her, but we’re actually here. Becky dropped his hands and turned toward the woman he assumed to be Miea. He’d seen her face before, though he couldn’t place it. She did look a little like Kiley, but that wasn’t it. The video. The restaurant. What was that all about?

  “Your Majesty,” Becky said, “I know I didn’t clear this with you, but I asked my father to come with me.”

  Miea nodded slowly. She didn’t seem annoyed, but at the same time, she seemed both baffled and uncomfortable. “Of course your father is welcome here, Becky. I’m sure Sorbus can arrange some kind of tour for him.”

  “He’s here to work, Your Majesty.”

  Chris was only half listening to this exchange. The rest of his attention focused on his surroundings. The translucent writing implements. The bluish cast of the indirect lighting. The labyrinthine weave of the carpeting. The atonal music outside that he could barely hear.

  “Work, Becky?”

  “My Dad’s a scientist. A plant scientist.”

  At those words, Chris glanced over at the Miea. The queen was looking directly at him. Her gaze was serious, but there was a flicker in her eyes. “Do you think you can help us with the blight?”

  Chris drew himself up. More sightseeing later
. There’s a job to do now. “I really don’t know, Your Majesty. But I’m happy to give you full access to my brain.”

  “The brain that helped conjure Tamarisk.”

  Chris glanced over at the shimmering walls. “I don’t think I can take much credit for that.”

  Miea motioned Chris and Becky to the table. “Please, come sit. The emergency council and I were just discussing the latest damage reports. To be honest, we talk about little else here these days.”

  Chris sat next to an elderly man, and a man and a woman much closer to Miea’s age. “Can you brief me on the situation?”

  The queen nodded and the woman next to Chris addressed him. “Are you familiar with blight conditions?”

  “I’ve worked with several and studied many others.”

  “This one progresses in three stages. Affected plants show signs of banding for up to two weeks. Next comes a shorter period where the bands fade and the plants lose the ability to feed. Finally, necrosis and death.”

  “Conida?”

  “The spores develop within the root system. They remain internal until the final stages of necrosis.”

  “Is this common for blight here?”

  “Blight in itself is not common here. On the occasions where we have had any kind of localized diseases, the conida were always external. We have not had an instance of internal blight conida in nearly a decade.”

  Clearly botanical conditions were different in Tamarisk than they were at home. This was both good news and bad. Good in that it gave Chris reason to believe that he could provide ideas the locals would not have considered. Bad because there was an excellent chance that his ideas would have no relevance here.

  For the next half hour, Chris quizzed the woman on every detail of the disease, examining samples of plants at various stages of infestation, trying to interpret data with a different set of specifications than any he was used to, and attempting to rule out as many possible causes as he could. Occasionally, the young man sitting next to the woman contributed a piece of information. Both of them obviously reported to the elderly man, but other than nodding at his colleagues once or twice, the man did not engage in this conversation. No one else, including Miea herself, participated. Every now and then, Chris would look at another person seated at the table and catch an expression both rapt and stultified.

  They’re probably as baffled by this experience as I am. I wonder how many of these people even knew Becky existed, and now they’ve seen her and her dad materialize out of thin air.

  At one point, he exchanged glances with Becky. Her eyes were gleaming and her complexion shone. It dawned on him that she had been listening carefully to his exchanges and that she was impressed. Proud of him. He’d have to remember to travel to fantasy worlds with her more often.

  Chris took extensive notes. Like everything else, this was a little disorienting at first because the paper felt so brittle (though it turned out to be as sturdy as twenty-four-pound bond), the pen wrote with virtually no drag, and the ink took a second or two to appear on the page. Chris acclimated to this as quickly as he could, though, because he wanted to take all of this information back with him, to study it and reference it against his texts and do further research online.

  While he was writing something the woman said about the similarity between the biological makeup of the spores and that of a cyst found on a bird a few years ago in Pinzon, the pen stopped working. He shook it a few times and then reached over to borrow another. He suddenly felt heavier, as though the gravity on the planet had suddenly increased dramatically.

  “Dad, we have to leave,” Becky said.

  “I could use a little more time.”

  “Not an option. Once the pull starts—”

  Chris grabbed his papers. His eyes seemed to close of their own accord. He felt himself floating again and he wanted to look around to see what he was floating through. He couldn’t see anything, though. Less than a minute later, gravity normalized and he looked around to find himself back in Becky’s room.

  He lay back on the bed and looked at his daughter with a huge smile on his face. “That was incredible.”

  “You sounded pretty smart in there.”

  “Just making stuff up.”

  She pushed him playfully. “Do you think you can figure out what’s going on?”

  “I took a million notes. I’ll start looking through everything tomorrow morning—assuming I can even get to sleep tonight. Maybe I’ll just get started now.”

  Chris sat up to look through the papers.

  That’s when he noticed that they hadn’t made the transit with him.

  realityjunkie : alyssa and rob have no chance of staying together. did u see the way she was talking to dillon today?

  punkrockprincess : dillon rocks!!!!! alyssa would be better off with him anyway. maybe if rob didn’t kiss beth at kendra’s party alyssa wouldn’t be looking around.

  ilikepie : that kiss was totally innocent and alyssa can be pretty difficult sometimes. movies at my house friday night?

  Becky often found these IM exchanges entertaining, but her head just wasn’t in it today. She and her father had spent an hour Saturday night and then much of Sunday trying to reconstruct the briefing he had in Tamarisk. A lot of it was way beyond her understanding, but she was pretty good at prompting. She’d remind him that he said something that sounded like “Condoleezza” and that would jog him to write down something important about conida. By the time he dropped her back at Mom’s, he’d done a decent job of recalling everything. At least he thought he had.

  He said he was going to try to sneak some time on the mainframe at the office today to get a little research done. Becky knew it was hard for him to do nonwork things at work—especially since he’d been “kicked upstairs”—but he sounded like he was seriously going to try. All day at school, Becky wondered if he’d made any progress. Even now, while the discussion about whether Alyssa and Rob were going to survive the week raged on her computer screen, what she really wanted to do was call her dad.

  It dawned on her that she could IM him. She’d never done that at work, even though she had him on her buddy list, because it didn’t seem appropriate. Things were different now, though. She figured it was worth a shot.

  questgirl14 : hey, dad!

  She hit send and waited. Her friends continued to chatter on (it sounded like she would be going to a Drew Barrymore film festival at Natalie’s house on Friday and that Alyssa wasn’t invited), but the new screen she opened remained blank for several minutes.

  helichrysum : Beck? Nice surprise to see you pop up on my computer.

  questgirl14 : hows work goin?

  helichrysum : About the same. How was school?

  questgirl14 : it was fine. did you have time to do any research?

  helichrysum : Not as much as I wanted to do. I only got about twenty minutes on the big machine at lunchtime.

  questgirl14 : find anything?

  helichrysum : Some of the symptoms they talked about are similar to Dothistroma Needle Blight. It affects pine trees.

  questgirl14 : maybe that’s it!!

  helichrysum : The Tamarisk blight only has SOME of the symptoms. Actually, it has a lot of them, but the cycle of the disease is different and that could mean that it’s something else entirely.

  questgirl14 : is there a cure for this kind of blight?

  helichrysum : There’s a way to control it.

  questgirl14 : that’s way better than nothing!!!!! u think they should check into it?

  helichrysum : Two problems. The first is that there’s no way I can be certain that it’s anything like Dothistroma at this point, and if we treat the wrong thing, we could do a lot of harm. The second is that the control requires the use of copper fungicides. Might be a little tough to take barrels of the stuff with us (it’s going to be tougher to transport than paper and that didn’t go so well) and who knows if they have the raw materials in Tamarisk to make it there. That brings up a third thin
g, now that I think of it. Tamarisk is likely to be a very different ecosystem. If we introduce a fungicide from this world into it, we could wind up hurting them more than the blight has.

  questgirl14 : i don’t know if that’s possible.

  helichrysum : We’ll talk to them about it on Tuesday. Meanwhile, I’ll try to get a lot more research done.

  questgirl14 : thanks dad. it’s great that ur doing this. i’ll let you get back to work.

  helichrysum : Feel free to interrupt anytime.

  questgirl14 : u got it!!!!

  Her dad had raised some good points about the Tamarisk ecosystem. After all, the plants were blue and the dirt was black. Who knew what that did to the makeup of stuff? Dad probably would have started working some science into the Tamarisk stories if they’d kept going with them after he split with Mom. They’d both spent a lot more time talking about the logic of the world in the months before she cut things off. Since they didn’t get to the science, though, there was a definite chance that Tamarisk had significantly different physical laws. Odds are good, Beck, since it’s a different universe and is the product of your imagination.

  There weren’t going to be any easy answers here. She just knew it.

  punkrockprincess : hey becky, u still there???????

  questgirl14 : yeah, i’m still here, just thinking. I say thumbs-up drew barrymore, thumbs-down alyssarob, thumbs underground for dillon and I’ll bring the popcorn on fri. the stuff we had last time tasted toxic!!!!!!!!!

  Chris needed to pull himself away from the computer to get to his dinner date with Lisa. Once people had started to leave the office for the day, it had been much easier for him to access the mainframe without interruption or anyone questioning what he was doing. The mainframe, after all, was for working scientists. He felt like he was making progress, but he’d told Lisa he’d meet her at a trendy new raw food restaurant at 7:30. At 7:15, he finally shut down his computer, which meant he was going to be ten minutes late.