The Switch

by Hill, A. W.

  “In the ancient days of your world,” said Orlong, in her new voice. “When your desert fathers and Dark Age monks first sensed the presence of the One in nature…they traveled from country to country, island to island, forest to forest, looking for its source. We were made for this traveling. We are pilgrims, and travel is the natural mode when one is seeking something. And in those days, there were waystations for the pilgrims. Places to spend a cold night by a warm fire, in the company of others who understood your quest—to plot your next journey. This is such a place. And now that the time has come for me to leave, someone must take over. The mapping must continue, you see. Otherwise, who will assist travelers like yourselves?” Orlong looked at Mose and said, “That is Gordon’s gig.”

  Orlong did not strike me as much of a joker, or as someone who would think of telling anything other than the clear truth. But I had only just met him…her…, and Gordon now felt like my oldest friend. I looked at him and saw that there was a little tremble in his chin.

  “I think we need a private conference,” I said. “If that’s okay with you, Orlong.”

  “Of course,” said Orlong, with a very wizard-like nod.

  Once we were out in the hallway, I squinted hard at my friend. “Did you know this was going to happen, Gordon?”

  “I kinda half knew?” he said. “The other half didn’t snap in until now.”

  For an instant, he looked thunderstruck, and that made me just spontaneously hug him. You have to know, I’m generally not much of a hugger. Most hugs seem kind of phony to me, like air kisses. But when I did, Mose and Jemma did, too. And that’s when I had to choke back a sob.

  Jemma stroked his hair, and I could tell that it was the first time he’d been touched like that by any girl other than his mom. If he stayed here, it might also be the last time.

  “Girls.” Mose picked up my thought. “Now there’s one good reason to reconsider. There may not be a lot of potential Mrs. Nightshades coming this way.”

  “You do have a choice,” Jemma said. “Just like Jacobus said before we crossed the bridge. You always have a choice.”

  Gordon was obviously enjoying all the affection, but still, he put his chin up and stepped back. “Normally,” he said. “I’d agree with you. But there’s something different about this. I can’t explain it, but I can already see myself in Orlong. As if it’s already happened. I think maybe some worldline vectors are so powerful that choice kind of gets taken out of the picture. And even if you did choose to fight it, there would be consequences you couldn’t live with.”

  “Just let me ask Orlong one question,” I said. “Because I won’t be able to live with myself if we let you stay here without a damned good reason.”

  “Okay,” said Gordon.

  “Why does it have to be Gordon?” I asked the Mapmaker. “Why him?”

  “You know why, Jacobus,” said Orlong. “When the two of you met…on a playground, I believe—”

  “A baseball diamond,” I said.

  “Ah, yes. A diamond.” Orlong looked up toward the domed ceiling, where a diamond shape floated right over his head. “When you met,” she continued, “he already had quite a few things figured out, didn’t he?”

  “Hell yes,” I said. “And he pulled a baseball out of thin air.”

  “There is a part of Gordon—that essential part I spoke of—that has always existed on this worldline. Now the rest of him has come home.”

  “But he’ll be all alone,” said Jemma. “That’ll be horrible.”

  “And he’ll never see his family again,” said Mose. “That ain’t right.”

  “It won’t be so horrible,” Orlong said, in that still choppy but newly feminine voice. “Now that the switches are in place, other pilgrims will be passing through here. More as time goes on. ‘Home’ will be a different place for each of them, just as it is for each of you. And sometimes, it won’t be the place where they started. Even if it is, and they return, they will know it as if for the first time.” The quickly deteriorating form of the Mapmaker smiled. “And rest assured, there is a secondary worldline—perhaps many—on which Gordon is restored to his family safe and sound.”

  “You can do that?” Jemma asked in wonderment.

  “It’s not me doing it,” Orlong said. “But I can map it. It’s all mathematics. And when mathematics reaches a certain level of complexity, it transmutes into a kind of magic.”

  “Orlong’s right,” Gordon said and it seemed to me that he understood how big a deal this was. “I think maybe I made this choice a long time ago.”

  I let that sink in, and then said, “And me? By choosing to be with you, did I sentence you to getting old and dying in a floating castle?”

  “There’s no way you could’ve known that, Jake,” he said. But what he didn’t say was “no.” Instantly, it felt as if a whole bunch of new “switches” formed in my brain, as if Orlong’s maps streamed through me.

  Once two histories are joined, a new history is made.

  “We better do this, Jake,” Gordon said. “Otherwise, we’ll miss the window.”

  My head nodded, but my heart ached. Gordon walked back to the console and gave a shaky thumbs-up to the Mapmaker.

  “All right, Gordon,” said Orlong. “Watch me trace the maps with the new eyes I’ve given you. It takes some practice, but you have the knack for it. We are going to move your friends into a channel that is bisected here—” He pointed to a thick vertical line in the upper left quadrant of the display. “—by their original worldlines, which, as you can see, are bundled closely together.”

  “When I give the signal,” he turned to the rest of us, “the three of you will place your hands palm flat down on a pair of disks. Whatever you do, don’t remove them until the transfer is complete.” Orlong brushed her hands off, stretched her long fingers like a piano player getting ready for a concert, and began working the map.

  “Wait,” I said. “We have to stop and get Connor.”

  “That could be dangerous,” said Orlong. “You could get stuck. There are ‘traps’ in the multiverse, like the sandtraps on a golf course…or a vortex in a river. Some are very difficult to get out of.”

  “That’s a chance we’ll have to take.” I spun around to Mose and Jemma. “Guys, you don’t know Connor. He was my best friend. We pulled the first switch together. I have to find him…but you—you don’t have to risk it. If Orlong thinks he—I mean she…or—” I glanced at the Mapmaker’s fading form. “What do we call you? I mean, what—”

  “What sex?” A faint grin lit what was left of her face. “You don’t have a word for it…yet.”

  Jemma broke in. “We go as three, Jacobus. You had to leave Hartūn behind. I won’t make you leave a friend again. We’ll get Connor.”

  “I’m with the lady, Jake,” said Mose. “We’ve been through too much together to split up now. And besides—Jerrold—I still owe you one.”

  “Very well, then.” Orlong turned to her new partner. “Gordon, this will take some finesse. Landing somewhere along a vertical is fairly simple, but pinpointing a specific world state can be very tricky, given that they are in constant flux. We’ll have to go down to a very fine grain. I’ll need you to keep one hand—your left—on this green toggle, and the other on the map. Right….here. Keep it there as if your friends’ lives depended on it.” Orlong paused for a second, and then said, “You are the Mapmaker.”

  She turned around to face us.

  “All right. It’s time. Come forward. Jemma: disks one and two. Mose: three and four. Jacobus: five and six. Palms down. Lean in and take a wide stance to keep your balance. And stick to the plates like glue. If you lose contact, you may not make a successful jump. Remember, we’re aiming at a moving target, so there’s no second chance. Hurry! Before I fade away!”

  We scrambled to the console and took our places. There was no time for more group hugs, no time to say the things I wanted to say to Gordon—like that meeting him had changed my life. Or that I didn�
��t expect to meet anyone like him again. Or, finally, that I prayed one day, in some world we couldn’t even imagine yet, we’d be back together. For the first few seconds, we held eyes, and I tried to say those things without speaking. After that, Gordon broke eye contact and turned his focus to the display.

  “Stay weird, Gordon,” said Mose. “Don’t ever change.”

  “We love you, Gordon,” said Jemma. “We always will.”

  The disks began to glow beneath our palms. The warmth shot up as the wavelength shifted, going right through me. My perception blurred, because refracted through the crystal walls around us was not one world, but many. What could possibly feel stranger than that? I looked to my left and saw Orlong morph into something like a robe of light.

  A cascade of hair like spun gold fell down her back. A woman’s back. A goddess. Except that this goddess had my mother’s face, and then the face of all mothers and fathers combined.

  The room spun and segmented, faster and faster, shifting colors, shifting energies, subdividing like cells—and yet every one of them contained us, looking out as if from the inside of a bubble. We were moving at light speed, and then again, we weren’t moving at all, and the combination of the two made it difficult to hold on. It was like a cosmic merry-go-round whose speed increased with every turn. I stole a glance at Gordon, and saw that he looked scared, because he, too, was having trouble holding on and was close to falling, and I saw—much too late—that Jemma had also seen this, and had impulsively taken her hand from the console and put it on Gordon’s back to brace him. I shouted, “No!” but it was like shouting over a tornado. What remained of Orlong rushed to her side like a ragged spirit and clamped her hand back down on the disk.

  “Close the circuit!” the Mapmaker cried, but the cry came from a universe away, and before the breath had left her throat, Orlong was gone.

  And we—we were someplace else.

  e were on a beach—Mose and I were. And nonsensically, we were sitting on the sand and looking out at what seemed a very big ocean. It took me a minute to figure out why I was certain it was an ocean and not yet another version of Lake Michigan. It was the salt. You could smell it. And maybe because of the salt, the fish smell was different, too. They say the ocean is where we came from, way back in whatever era that was, and Mose and I had come from there today. Not long ago, because we were still wet.

  Now, bear with me when I say that we didn’t realize immediately that Jemma wasn’t with us. This business of moving from world to world is about as disorienting as you can possibly imagine, and though we were getting used to certain things, the first few minutes in a new world are like being born again. Not in a religious way, so much, but in a physical way. Somehow, with the ancient, salty ocean so close, it felt as if we’d been spat up onto the shore like newborn babies. And like babies, we couldn’t see or think straight.

  We just sat and stared, and finally, Mose said, “She didn’t make it.”

  My body, which a few seconds ago had been kind of limp and non-located, got suddenly tight and very much there. Why is it that hearing the words is always worse than thinking the thoughts?

  “Hold on,” I said. “We just got here.”

  In my head, I began to panic, because if Jemma truly hadn’t made it across, this whole crazy adventure had just become one big tragedy. When we’d met the Mapmaker, and understood his maps, I’d allowed my hopes to rise, and let my imagination picture all of us back in Chicago, inhaling deep-dish pizza. And of course, Jemma was sitting next to me, her shoulder and knee pressed against mine, looking at me like we shared a big secret.

  You, who have the benefit of my hindsight, are probably way ahead of where I was, and thinking, “Jacobus is in love.” But I hadn’t realized that yet. I was still in the newborn baby realm of pure feeling. And the feeling was dizzying.

  “She didn’t make it, Jake,” Mose said again. “I saw her take her hand off the plate right in the middle of it. She was trying to help Gordon.”

  On the mention of Gordon’s name, my heart sunk even deeper.

  “We should never have left him,” I said bleakly.

  “We had to leave someone,” Mose said. “But I know what you mean.”

  “But I think—about the plate thing—that Orlong got to her in time.”

  Mose, good guy that he was, said nothing and let me hang on to my last thread of hope.

  We stared out at the ocean for a minute, and then I said, “Did we come out of that water? I don’t remember getting wet.”

  “I don’t either,” said Mose. “But I guess we must’ve. What ocean do you think it is? The Pacific? The Atlantic?”

  I ran a handful of sand through my fingers. “You got me. I’d guess the Pacific. But what do I know? Maybe we’re on planet 244X.”

  “Could be the Caribbean,” Mose said. “Look behind. It’s all green mountains, like pictures of Jamaica and places like that. Maybe we’ll meet a Rastafarian.”

  “What’s that?” I asked absently. I was scanning the beach for signs of a lost girl, and nursing a yawning emptiness where she and Gordon had been.

  “A reggae guy. Like Bob Marley. With dreadlocks and a beeg spleef, mon.” He pretended like he was smoking weed, and I have to say—now that I know what he was talking about—that he had the accent down.

  But I didn’t have it in me to laugh. My mood was falling as fast as the late afternoon sun. I dropped my forehead to my knees, and heard Mose stand up and brush the sand off his jeans.

  “Well, we can’t stay here, Jake,” he said. “I know it hurts, but the sun’ll be down in an hour. Maybe we should head down the beach and see if we can find your friend. I mean, unless Orlong had it wrong, he should be in the vicinity, right? And besides, man, I need something to eat soon or I’ll drop.”

  “We gotta wait a little longer, Mose. Maybe Jemma taking her hand off the plate created a delay or something. Maybe Gordon’s working on it right now. And if this is the landing spot, and we leave, she’ll never find us.”

  “Ten minutes,” Mose agreed. “But no more, Jake. We don’t know where we are. If this turns out to be Zanzibar instead of Jamaica, there could be man-eating tigers that come out of those jungles at night. Or cannibals. And if we can find the next switch, she will, too.”

  “All right,” I said, desolate. “Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. I don’t care about cannibals.”

  “Like I said back in hivetown.” Mose grinned. “You are one whipped white man.”

  The sand was still warm from the day’s sun, and the air would stay soft and balmy through the night. The sea was green out to the end of a long sandbar, and deep blue after that. It was the sort of place that under different circumstances might have seemed like a paradise. We pushed our jeans up above our knees and waded into the warm salty water. There was only the sea stretching on forever, and us, and in that aching emptiness, I lost control of my emotions. I swallowed a huge gulp of air, and it made a sound like I was choking. The tears came after that, and I couldn’t stop them.

  “Hey, Jake—” said Mose, worried.

  “Why did Gordon have to stay?” I said through my sobs. “We were almost home.”

  “Man.” Mose shook his head. “People do things that don’t make sense at the time because they have to. I get the feeling, like Orlong said, that Gordon knew he was home.”

  “But how can that be? Can you really have more than one home in the universe?”

  “Well, maybe you can if it’s a multiverse. I’m still waiting to see where mine is. I know I said I was going back to Clybourn. But I don’t know now…”

  For another ten or fifteen minutes, we didn’t say anything. Mose had become suddenly very philosophical. He was the one to break the silence.

  “Damn,” he said.

  “Damn what?”

  “Where the hell are we supposed to find a switch in a place like this?”

  “Beats me,” I said. “Maybe there’s a town somewhere. I mean, if Connor is here, there has to be some
kind of town, right?”

  “Unless he went native,” Mose said. “Maybe we’ll find him swinging from the trees like Tarzan.”

  And in spite of my aching heart, I laughed at the thought of that.

  “What do you think Gordon’s doing right now?”

  “I think he’s watching us,” said Mose. “On the maps. I think he’ll be watching us for the rest of our lives.”

  I realized as I let that sink in that Mose was both tough and deep. He might’ve started out as a city kid from the poor side of North Avenue, but he was bigger than any one place. And I was sure that history, which was now much, much bigger than any one universe, had plans for him, too. He was going to be a leader. And me, I was probably going to write about him.

  “What’s that?” he said softly, pointing at a distant place beyond the sandbar, where the sea swelled like a living thing.

  “What?”

  “Something’s moving out there. Maybe a seal—except I don’t know if they have seals in Jamaica. It’s bobbing up and down. You see it when the waves go down.”

  “Maybe something that got washed out to sea.” I squinted, making a visor with my hands to block the glare of the setting sun.

  “Nah,” said Mose. “It’s alive. And it’s got fur. Or hair. Or something.”

  “You got better eyes than me,” I said. “All I see—Wait! I saw it. Something came out of the waves and went back down again. Like an—”

  “Like an arm,” Mose said. “It’s a swimmer, I think. But how—”

  And then it happened. The swimmer reached the sandbar, where the water was shallow, and stood up. Her hair fell long and straight, the soaking wet, oversized t-shirt she’d been wearing clung to her and reflected the light refracted from the white seafoam, making a sort of glow around her shoulders as if there were wings there.

  Jemma was arriving from the ocean. Born again.

  I couldn’t help myself. I ran, kicking up the sun-warmed water and fighting the drag on my clothes until I was close enough to be sure. She kept walking slowly toward me until the water level fell below her waist, and then I saw the smile break out on her face, bright as the sun.