The Switch

by Hill, A. W.

Connor and Jemma kept eating, but for Mose and I, time stopped, and so did swallowing.

  “You know the Duke of Earl?” Mose said, incredulous. “From Clybourn Street?”

  “Long time ago.” Youseff took Mose’s question to a slightly different place. “Wise men used to believe that the universe was made up of nine spheres made of the finest crystal. One nested inside the other like invisible globes, smaller and smaller until you got down to where we are. And they were always turning, turning, turning. The biggest, most far away sphere was God, and in the outer spheres you had different kinds of angels. Closer to the earth, you had these…let’s just call them higher beings. Not like kings. More like—”

  “Saints?” Mose asked.

  “In a way, maybe. But the kind of saints who were always on the move…travelers. Watchers.” Youseff paused. “You see, those wise men were not wrong. They just didn’t know how to draw the picture the right way. They made it too perfect, too mathematical, because this is what they knew. The spheres are more like, well…there is a word in Arabic that is just right, but for you, hmm…let’s just say places. Levels. They aren’t hard things made of glass. Some of us can move in those places. The Duke is a traveler, like me.”

  “I kinda wondered about that,” said Mose. “Even before I knew what the hell that was.”

  “Did you know we were coming?” Jemma asked.

  “Yes,” said Youseff. “I received a message. But even if I had not, I would have known as soon as I saw you. You had that ‘just got off the bus’ look. Nobody comes to the Syrian desert without provisions.”

  “And you do know Gordon Nightshade, right?” I asked.

  “My friend Gordon.” He smiled gently. “The little guy with the big brain. How is he now? Is he still traveling?”

  “He was with me almost from the start,” I said. “But we had to leave him with the Mapmaker. To be the new one, I guess. It was his choice…if he really had a choice.”

  Youseff threw back his head and laughed. “The Mapmaker! Yes, that old queen tried to talk me into the gig, too. I said ‘no way,’ Youseff must keep floating and fighting. You always have a choice, my friend!”

  “But I don’t understand,” said Mose. “If you’re a floater, what are you doing here? In this—”

  “Bottomless pit?” Youseff said. “I am here for my village. You see, here is how it works. We go out there to the first ‘sphere,’ where all the worldlines connect—some of us go by accident, some because we are curious and we pull the switch to see what happens. Most want to get home as fast as possible. But some of us decide to keep floating. After a while, we get good at it. And now that we have found our way to the Mapmaker, we can even sometimes…I have forgotten the English word, even though I went to an English school. Inter— Inter—”

  “Intervene?” I asked. “You mean you can come back into the world—any world—and change things?”

  “In some ways, yes,” he said. “In other ways, no. But we can, with care…intercede! That is the precise word I was looking for.”

  “Like angels,” Connor said. “That’s what they do, right? Intercede in human stuff.”

  “Yes,” said Youseff. “But no wings!” He peeled back his robe to show his bare shoulder. “You know people…they always have to draw a picture. Just like the ancient ones did with the crystal spheres. The closest we have to wings is a kind of radar to find the place we started from. An instinct.”

  “Like pigeons,” I said.

  “Like pigeons,” Youseff repeated. “And the pigeon—”

  We all said it together. “—always flies home.”

  “Right,” said Youseff. “Now you are getting it. And this is my home.”

  “I don’t think any of us have that instinct yet,” said Mose. “I don’t even think Gordon did, else he would’ve taken himself there.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Youseff. “I will show you the way. There is just one thing I must ask of you before you go.”

  “You saved our lives. You can ask anything.” I shot a glance around at the other three. “Speaking for myself, at least.”

  “I think you earned the right,” said Mose, and all nodded.

  Youseff nodded, too, and his face grew very serious.

  There was a distant explosion, and then one much closer. Youseff’s mother shuddered and dropped the lump of dough she was shaping into bread. The donkeys in the stable snorted and kicked. People outside the hut stopped and looked worriedly toward the valley.

  “They are frightened. They are frightened because the last time these men came—if we can call them men—they killed our fathers and took our sisters. I came back to bring them justice. I made a new name and a new history for myself and joined up with them. It took some time to earn their trust, but when I did, I got a message to the Yezidi Kurds and they got a message to the Americans. The Americans called in a strike. Everything is timing. The enemy was supposed to be in that church at the time of high sun, having their sleep before the night of fighting. But then you came. You changed the plan. The worldline. So they escaped the strike.”

  “Maybe that’s a good thing,” Connor said. “If they had been inside the church, we would’ve been with them, and we’d be in a million pieces right now.”

  “On that worldline, yes,” said Youseff. “You would have been dead, my friend.”

  “That brings up something that’s been knocking around in my brain, Youseff,” said Mose. “If we die while we’re traveling, isn’t that the end of us, ‘least far as we know? I mean, you can’t just reboot like in a game…”

  “No, you can’t,” said Youseff. “Not like that.” Then he got that serious look again. “But you cannot kill a soul. Or PEF, whatever you choose to call it. The way it is set up, we cannot make a choice that causes our soul to be extinguished. You…the guy who is talking to me right now…if you die, your worldline will end. But in some world—in many worlds—you go on.”

  “Except that you never know it, right?” I asked. “It’s not like you’d resurrect and say, “Oh, cool. I was dead but now I’m alive again.”

  “No,” said Youseff. “Not like that. But you don’t forget completely either. There is always a little something deep in here…” He pointed to the center of his forehead. “That says, ‘I left someone behind.’ This is how we become wise.”

  “That’s kind of sad,” Jemma said. “Leaving pieces of yourself behind.”

  “But if you can stay alive,” I said, with a sudden burst of enthusiasm. “You can remember, right? Like we remember where we’ve traveled.”

  “You remember because you are still traveling,” he said. “And because you chose to be. Once you stop traveling, you forget. For some, it takes a few days. For others, only a night’s sleep, and then it fades like a dream. Normal people, they switch worlds a hundred times a day without knowing. A phone rings. They don’t answer it. It was a call saying they won a million dollars, but they will never know. They will never have that life. They make a wrong turn in their car, but they miss the accident that would have killed them. When you go back home, you won’t remember sitting here with me, until it happens again. Which it will, sooner or later. And then you’ll say, ‘I’ve been here before!’”

  “Brother,” said Mose. “You are blowing my mind.”

  It seemed to be a good time to ask: “So there are, like, loops? You can come back to the same worldline?” I turned to Connor. “That must’ve been what happened on your island. I was stuck in a loop of trying to get you off it. But I didn’t know it. Why?”

  “Only because you are new at this,” said Youseff.

  “So,” said Mose. “Before you tell us what our mission is…what was Duke’s message?”

  “The Duke said, ‘Tell Moses to look after his mama. That she’ll be all right now. And tell him, in case he didn’t notice, that the cough is gone.’”

  “Hey,” I said. “That’s true. I haven’t heard that noise in your chest for a long time.”

  Mose poun
ded his fist against his newly healthy chest. “John Brown’s Baby has no cold upon his chest, cold upon his chest…”

  I joined in for the third, “cold upon his chest,” and wished that Gordon were there to sing, too. He would have liked that. I also wondered if, when we finally got back to where I had come from, my heart murmur would still be there.

  “Sometimes,” said Youseff. “A small correction is all it takes to get rid of glitches in your program. A tiny shift in your worldline. From what I’ve learned, I don’t think that human beings were meant to be stuck on just one vector. We were meant to be pilots of our souls.”

  “I like that,” said Jemma. “I like that a lot.”

  “Our program?” said Connor. “You’re not saying we’re like in the Matrix or something? That our lives are just computer programs?”

  “No, no, no,” said Youseff. “We are real. Life is real. But remember that we all have this basic self. The part that doesn’t change. What is that made of? Not flesh or bones. It is made of information that is stored in the universe and never, ever forgotten.”

  “How can you know that?” pressed Connor.

  “Well,” Youseff stood up and brushed the dust from his trousers, “for one thing, by deduction. Aristotle, but also al-Kindi and Averroes. I will put it to you as a kind of riddle: how is it possible that we can see the many?”

  Connor rocked back and forth a while before conceding, “I don’t know. Tell me.”

  Youseff grinned. “Because we are one. If no unity connected our different existences, we could not speak of them as parallel. Most people don’t see this. They see like the frog, down in the mud. But we are birds. We—the ones who travel—can go in and make little adjustments.”

  “Glad you know what the hell you’re doin’,” said Mose. “I was worried that without little Gordon, we’d lost our pilot.”

  “Who do you think taught Gordon everything he knows?” Youseff gave us that gap-toothed grin. “Now—” He squatted and began to draw in the dirt. “Here is what I must ask of you. The Kurdish commander for the regional pesh merga unit sent me a message. He told me I have one more chance to get the coordinates right. To bring justice to the men who destroyed my village.” He looked around, and at his mother. “Thank God, not all of it.”

  I shot a look at Mose. I think we both had an idea what was coming. We were just sixteen, and we were going to be involved in a war. Not a game war, but one with no reset.

  “He sent you a message?” I asked. “How? On what?”

  Youseff reached into a deep pocket in his robe and pulled out a cell phone. A good one.

  “Is that an Iridium phone?” Connor asked. “Damn.”

  “It’s a tricked-out Samsung with a SatSleeve,” Youseff said. “You don’t have them only in America. But this one is special. This one will get you home.” He drew a curve. “At the eastern base of Jabal Nuzra, this mountain we are on—” He continued tracing out the shape of the land in the dirt. “—there is a very ancient place. A dwelling cut into the rock by our ancestors.”

  “You mean like a cave?” Mose asked.

  “Much more than a cave,” Youseff said. “You will see. This is one of six hideouts the killers use. They move from place to place so that the Americans and others cannot find them with their spy planes and satellites. But I believe that tonight they will be there. I believe it, but I have to be sure before I make the call. I have to get very close to the entrance of this rock house, and there are sentries positioned all around that entrance. They don’t just stand in one place. They move around in the dark. To get close enough without getting shot, I need lookouts to signal me from any direction they might come.”

  “How do we signal you without giving ourselves away?” I asked.

  “I am going to teach you a special call. It is the sound made by a big lizard that lives in this desert and goes hunting at night. A very soft clicking sound in the throat…but out here, you can hear it from even one hundred meters away. If I can confirm that the men are there and call it in, the commander told me that the drone would come in fifteen minutes.”

  Youseff gave us some time to let that sink in.

  “You’re asking us,” Jemma said softly, “to help you bring that thing from the sky that destroyed the church. To help you kill people.”

  “Yes,” said Youseff, and there was no smile. “In this world, they will exist no more. In another, where they make better choices, maybe. Even so, the choice to cause someone’s death does not become easier in a universe of many worlds. And the price you pay—in your heart—is not less. But if someone makes a choice that puts his worldline on a collision course with you or those you love, you must act. This is what is meant by an enemy. You must choose. In this way—and only in this way—is life like a video game.”

  I got up and walked around the flimsy hut. I felt wired, tied up inside. I tried stretching, but it didn’t help. Finally, I squatted back down next to Youseff. “Back there at the church, the Leader—or at least he looked like the leader—told us they were going to break the world. What did he mean?”

  Youseff shook his head. “For these men…many of them no older than me…life has lost all its flavor, its color, its music. It can be for many reasons. They come here from all over the world. Maybe they have a deep belief that the world has become corrupt and must be burned clean. Or maybe some girl back home put a knife in their heart and drained it of love. But for all of them, the solution is to take apart what people have built. So they begin by destroying our ancient temples and monuments. And then eventually, they must destroy everyone who is less pure in his hatred of the world than they are. Do you see? Do you understand? They are—”

  “I understand,” said Mose. “They’re evil.”

  “What possesses them is evil, yes,” said Youseff. “The law of the many worlds is to preserve. That is a law as certain as gravity. We can move past bad worlds by making better choices. But we must not leave smoking ruins and dead children behind us. These people are possessed by a force that is against life. Unfortunately, the only way to defeat that force—”

  “Okay,” I said. “I get it.” I looked over at Jemma, and she nodded. Then a bleak thought snaked into my sixteen year-old brain. I don’t know. Maybe it was my first brush with existentialism. “Youseff,” I began haltingly. “You said that in another world, where they made better choices, these bad guys might live. Does that mean that the choices we make don’t have real consequences? I mean, you know, multiversal consequences?”

  “No,” he answered, and then repeated it for emphasis. “No. All the worlds are entangled. The choices we make in one world send ‘ripples’ into the others. Because there is one big mind, and the mind knows. Many worlds, one Mind. This is your karma. This is why we must treat each world as if it was the only one. And in this world, these men must pay for their choice.”

  “Let’s go over this again,” I told Youseff. “I get it now.”

  The plan wasn’t complicated, but it was risky. When the sun dropped low enough, Youseff took us down the mountain path to the base, and showed us the rock house, which was more like a rock palace. Its columns and windows and ancient artwork had been carved right into the hillside: bulls with wings and men with the heads of dragons. He showed us the ground the sentries patrolled, and the boulder, or tree, or gully that would conceal us. He taught us the lizard sound, which (and this is truly weird) was almost exactly like the lizard sounds in the Mapmaker’s world. It came from a part of my throat that I hadn’t known was there until he showed me. He told us that since the sentries were used to the sound, they would ignore it. That is, unless we messed it up somehow. I raised the one doubt I had left.

  “But if the sentries are there, doesn’t that mean that the fighters are inside? Why can’t you call in the strike once you’ve seen them, and not risk getting so close?”

  “Because they play a shell game,” Youseff said. “Do you know what that is? The sentries are the youngest fighters—the ones of l
owest rank. The leaders move them around like pawns to trick the enemy and draw his fire. The sentries die for the cause, told that they will be the first into Paradise. But do you know how Paradise comes in a multiverse?”

  “How?” asked Mose. “I always hoped I’d get there.”

  “It comes through correct action,” said Youseff. “Like I said, there is law in the multiverse.”

  “Does that mean,” I crouched behind a huge red boulder, “that there’s a Lawmaker, too? Like there was a Mapmaker? Is that what the big mind is?”“

  “I will tell you a secret,” said Youseff. “Because you have earned it by being at my side right now. The law is one flower with many seeds. We—those who travel, are the seeds to be planted. But the flower is not a ‘Lawmaker,’ if you are picturing a mighty judge or a priest with a long beard. The flower is the Law itself. The Law is alive. Now…take up your positions.”

  I was going to say something—and I think Mose was, too. There were a thousand questions. But somehow it seemed better to let them hang in the powdery twilight of the desert. There is a time for questions, and a time for action.

  Youseff vanished like a ghost. The next time I spied him, he was two hundred meters away, inching slowly along the carved rock face. Watching him in the vanishing light, seeing how he moved like the wind, reminded me of Mose in the alley off Clybourn and Jemma hurtling over the hives. They all knew their territory, and they were all scouts: people meant to take you someplace. I looked at my friends—Mose, Connor, Jemma—all of us too stiff with fear to move. But for an instant, in the very heart of that fear, I felt a burning pride.

  “Let’s do this thing,” said Mose.

  “Yeah,” said Connor. “What the hell…you only live—” He didn’t finish.

  “When the sun goes behind the mountain,” I said, “we won’t be able to see each other. But if anyone gets grabbed, hoot like an owl.” I dropped my voice as low as it would go. “You know, ‘Hoo…hoo.’”

  Mose wrapped his long, street-muscled arms around me and gave me a hug. I did the same to Connor. Then I turned to Jemma. The light on her face was a burnt gold, and in her eyes I saw the least fear of any of us. I put my arms around her shoulders for a hug, but she slipped her own arms through mine, pulled my neck to her, and kissed me. Her lips weren’t stiff or puckered the way a mom’s or a friend’s are when they kiss you. They were soft and full, and tasted of the date butter we’d eaten in Youseff’s shack. And after that, the fear didn’t matter anymore. I was wearing gold-plated armor.