The Universes Inside the Lighthouse

by Stucky, Pam

  Defeated, she turned once again to the operations panel. “I know I have the right numbers. I know I do,” she said.

  “Could you have reversed something?” Emma suggested gently. She felt helpless and lost, in more ways than one. Sensing Eve felt the same thing was not a comfort.

  Eve leaned her forehead against the wall and let out a string of English curse words under her breath. So she’s learned the more colorful parts of our language, too, Emma thought. She reached out and soothed Eve’s glorious silver-blonde hair. “It’ll be okay,” she said. But would it?

  “Try again,” Eve scolded herself, raising her head. She looked at the panel and whispered numbers out loud as she tapped them in. With a final “… seven, nine,” she hit the “enter” button.

  Fearing she might fall over from fatigue and an existential weariness, Emma sat down on the floor to wait out the dizziness and the other sensations that were now becoming all too familiar. She forced herself to take long, slow, deep breaths as the universes spun and whirled her from one unknown spot to another. If the universes will listen when I want a door opened, she thought, maybe they’ll listen to other messages. She sent up a wish to any forces that might be willing to hear: Please, let us go home.

  The room settled again. The teens looked at each other with anxiety and hope. The door to the outside slid open. A warm, gentle breeze blew in.

  Once again, definitely not home.

  Every sense on alert, the foursome walked slowly and quietly out of the security of the storage closet into a bright night on another alien world. The dim light indicated evening or nighttime, but two moons, high in the sky, lit the landscape and created long, eerie shadows. One moon seemed about four times the size of Earth’s moon; the second, near the first but slightly lower in the sky, appeared to be much smaller. Whether waxing or waning, it wasn’t clear, but both were nearly full. The air smelled like freshly watered house plants, Emma thought, a smell of damp earth. Was it earth if it wasn’t Earth? Damp dirt, then, Emma corrected herself in her mind. A scent that indicated there may have been a recent rain. The sky was more or less cloud-free, but that meant nothing.

  The shadows seemed to move, to play tricks on the eye. Was that a creature moving over there, or just the low leaves of a tree, rustling in the wind? “Shhhh,” said Emma, to no one in particular.

  “Why are we being quiet?” Charlie replied in a loud whisper, crouching beside his sister. He breathed in and out forcefully, testing the air, or testing the amber rock on his bracelet.

  “Because we do not know one darned thing about this place. Look around. This place is absolutely ripe for dinosaurs,” said Emma. “Be quiet or a velociraptor will come swipe you.”

  There were no velociraptors nor any other kind of dinosaurs in sight, but the land did have the look and feel of an ancient Earth. Some plants had leaves the size of umbrellas or larger. Others plants resembled giant palm trees. Everything was massive, in fact. Emma felt as if she’d been shrunk into Alice in Wonderland’s world.

  Ben, however, was enchanted. “Maybe it’s more of a Utopia than a Jurassic Park,” he suggested. “I mean, smell that.”

  Normally when someone told her to “smell that,” Emma did not comply—especially if that someone was Charlie—but for Ben, she did. She inhaled deeply and her nose was rewarded with a mingling of lush floral and tropical scents. She couldn’t see the source of the smells, but her instincts told her it was a combination of flowers, fruits, and other unknown unearthly wonders.

  “Delicious,” she said as she exhaled. “Intoxicating. I wish there were more light so we could see.” She looked up at the sky and realized there were not two, but three moons. A third was just coming up over the horizon, whereas the two they’d first seen were quickly rising higher in the sky, illuminating the planet below. “Three moons!” she said. “A person could write a nice romantic love song with three moons.” In the darkness, she blushed.

  “Can we stay a while?” asked Charlie. “I mean, we just got here, and it’s our first real alien planet. Other than the other Earth, of course, which was so much like our Earth that it didn’t count. And the water planet. And the dead planet. This is the first interesting one. Can we look around?”

  Emma had a feeling Eve would say no, though she, too, hoped for a “yes.” Just long enough for the sun to come up—or maybe suns again?—so they could see the landscape in the daytime. Long enough to explore the trees and maybe find a river or lake to sit by. Even in the darkness, this planet seemed beautiful.

  Sure enough, Eve was eager to move on. “We can only stay for a minute or two. We have to get back,” she said. “I don’t know how, but we have to get back to the Hub. We have to find Dr. Waldo, and we have to find my dad.”

  Emma noticed that Eve hadn’t mentioned Vik. Priorities had changed, at this point. Milo came first. Vik could come later.

  The group had wandered a good ways from the elevator again, but this time Ben had not left his jacket behind; it would have just been lost in the night.

  “Make note of where the elevator is, everyone,” said Eve. “Look around for landmarks, recognizable groupings of trees, anything that will help us find our way back.”

  Charlie looked in the direction they’d come from. “It’s invisible again! Let me try that vibration thing—” he said, about to run back to where he thought the elevator was hiding. He stopped abruptly as Ben held out one arm, as though to keep a passenger in a car from flying through the windshield when stopping suddenly.

  “What is it?” said Eve in a whisper so low it was barely audible.

  Ben’s breathing was shallow. Moving as little as possible, he pointed at an area just left of where the elevator had been.

  “I don’t—” Emma said, but then, she saw it too.

  Eyes. The unmistakable glow of eyes, almost hidden within the giant foliage.

  A cloud shifted off the largest moon, and the landscape grew brighter. Shadows shifted, and the creatures that owned the eyes emerged ever so slightly from the darkness.

  These were the eyes of people, intelligent beings.

  People with spears.

  People with spears, pointed at them.

  The people with spears bolted forward.

  “RUN!” Eve cried out. Grabbing Emma by the hand, she pulled her along at top speed. Ben and Charlie raced behind them. They tracked through the unfamiliar terrain, tripping on roots and rocks and thorns, scratching and tearing their way through the dense foliage without looking back to see if they were even still being chased. Eve somehow managed to keep hold of Emma’s hand, and changed direction to run toward a hill. With nothing else to do but trust Eve, Emma followed.

  They’d been running for several minutes when Eve, still dragging Emma, nimbly slipped through a gap between two rocks and pulled Emma in behind her. Panting, she tapped a device on her wrist, and a dim red light illuminated the tiny space they’d found. The crack, which Emma couldn’t imagine how Eve had even found, opened up to a larger space inside the hill. Not quite a cave, but more than an indentation in the wall. After determining they were alone in the dark space, they sat down on some large boulders to catch their breaths.

  “But aren’t we trapped now?” whispered Emma between gasps. It had been a while since she’d run that far and that hard. “They can get us in here. We’re as good as dead.”

  Eve looked at her and shook her head in a gesture of helplessness. “I didn’t know what else to do. I kept tripping. I was scared we’d fall and hurt ourselves and die out there, from exposure or worse. I saw this crack in the rock, and just hoped—” She didn’t finish her sentence.

  “Wait, where are Charlie and Ben?” Emma dashed to the opening they’d slipped through and peered out into the shadows. She saw nothing, just the movement of leaves in the soft warm wind, but no Charlie, no Ben. No natives, either, which was good, but she kept squinting, trying to see some sign of her brother or their friend so she could wave them down and hasten them over to join
her and Eve in the tight space. While running, they hadn’t had time or opportunity or foresight to make sure everyone stayed together, and now Charlie and Ben were nowhere to be seen. Had they been speared by the natives? Were they still alive? The fear, the thought of what was and could be happening, the running, all of it made her want to throw up or cry.

  She chose crying.

  Eve moved from her boulder to sit with Emma on hers. With one arm she cradled Emma against her, shushed her and comforted her without words.

  When Emma calmed down a bit, Eve moved back to her own boulder.

  “I’m sure they’re okay,” Eve said.

  “You don’t know that,” said Emma.

  “I don’t know that,” Eve said, “but we may as well assume the best. Worrying will get us nowhere.”

  Emma couldn’t argue, but neither could she help herself. Calm down, she told herself. Calm down so you can think.

  She wiped the tears from her eyes. Now she understood how Eve and Milo might have gotten a little disheveled, the night they showed up at the cabin. It seemed so long ago. How long ago was it? Who could really say? Did her parents even know yet that she and Charlie were gone? Where were they in time, anyway? Too many questions, none of which could be answered. She looked at Eve, the shadow of Eve in the darkness. “So now what?” she said.

  Eve shrugged. “I guess we wait a bit. Maybe it’ll be daytime soon.” She poked at buttons on the device on her wrist again. “Looks like the night here is sixteen hours. We’ve got about four hours left before the sun comes up.” In the dim red glow she saw Emma’s look of surprise. “One of Dr. Waldo’s inventions,” she said. “It’s not all magic rocks, you know. Technology is pretty awesome, too.” She looked back to study the device. “Three moons are up, another should come up soon, and then the sun. Just one sun.”

  “That’s quite an app,” said Emma.

  “Dr. Waldo loves creating these things,” Eve laughed. “Thank goodness you guys finally got cell phones. When we first got to Earth we had to hide all our gadgets so no one would get suspicious. I had to carry this in my pocket,” she said, indicating the device on her wrist, “and I was always scared I’d lose it. Now, it just blends in. People might be curious but they aren’t suspicious.”

  Emma gave a grunt of agreement. A sudden wave of exhaustion washed over. She couldn’t remember ever being so tired, tired to her very core. Resigned to a few long hours in the tight space, Emma tried to get comfortable on the boulder. She leaned against the wall and found a position where a minimum of bumps were poking into her back. She could only imagine what it would be like to show up on Earth a hundred years ago, knowing what she knew now in the modern day. It would be hard, she thought, not to somehow slip up and reveal something that wasn’t meant to be known yet. It might also be hard to resist temptation to change the future, or the past, however one looked at it. Buy a winning lottery ticket, prevent a war, get in the path of someone else’s love life for the benefit of one’s own.

  She looked at the alien girl across from her. What a strange thing, she thought, what an unimaginable thing. Sitting in a cave on some foreign planet—who knew where in the multiverse—talking with a girl about her same age, from another world. Who would have ever imagined? Who would even believe it? And yet, somehow, it seemed despite the impossibilities, they shared common ground.

  “Do you like it?” Emma asked, carefully tipping her head against the rough wall. “Traveling like this? Is it fun?”

  Eve didn’t speak immediately. She looked at the device on her wrist, ran her fingers over the rock-filled bracelet.

  “It’s what I do, I guess. Dad’s all I have, and this is what he’s doing. And it’s important.” She looked Emma in the eye. “Very important.”

  Emma was thrown off by Eve’s intensity, but decided now was the time to get some answers. “You all have never really told us what’s up with this Vik dude,” she said.

  “No, I suppose we haven’t,” said Eve.

  “Well, I’ve got time now,” said Emma, shifting against the bruising rocks. “What’s the story?”

  Eve laughed. “It’s a long story. Where do I begin? It’s a story that has taken us a long time to piece together.” She paused for a minute, organizing her thoughts. “Okay. You know about the elevators. We used to think no one had ever discovered elevators on Napori, but it turns out that’s not true.”

  “Napori?” said Emma. “I don’t think you’ve mentioned that before. What is Napori?”

  “Ah,” said Eve. “Backing up even more. I can’t always remember what we’ve told you. So, Napori is what we on Lero call our mother planet. Bigger than Lero. It’s where our people evolved. All our people used to live there, but it became too crowded, too overpopulated. Our ancestors were using up all the space and all the resources, fast. They had to do something. They knew about Lero, knew it was habitable, and they already had mastered space travel, so the solution was pretty obvious. A couple hundred people left and established a home on Lero. Other people followed after a while. But it’s a long journey, and, well, the split was more than just physical. Same galaxy, but not really all that close. Not what you’d call convenient for visiting.”

  Eve paused, and Emma thought she might not go on. She waited patiently, and was rewarded.

  “So, we used to think no one had ever discovered elevators on Napori, as I was saying, but we were wrong. A long time ago on Napori—shortly after people left to populate Lero—someone discovered an elevator,” Eve continued. “He accessed the elevator, used it, but didn’t know what he was doing, obviously, and in the process he accidentally killed some people. He was so ashamed that he never told anyone, and no one else ever knew about that elevator. But, unbeknownst to that man and to everyone, in discovering the elevator, he’d awakened some dark forces. As it turns out, not telling anyone about it made it worse.

  “Then, as you know,” Eve went on, “a while later, my great great aunt—Great Aunt Doethine—discovered the first elevator on Lero. When she did, she was so excited that she told everyone, told all the scientific community, and lots of people got involved in studying it. Thus, the Hub, all the scientists. We don’t use the elevators all the time, but by opening up the Hub, we’ve made that elevator an active, dynamic, creative place. That may seem like a trivial point, but it matters. I have come to believe the elevators are meant to be used. We—intelligent life throughout the universes—are meant to connect with each other. We’re meant to explore and discover.

  “Anyway. Vik, he’s from Lero. He used to be just a normal guy on Lero, living a normal, happy Lero life. Then he and his best friend, a guy he’d known his whole life and who was like a brother to him, they visited Napori—they took the space shuttle, traveled the old-fashioned way. Maybe a year ago, one of our years. When they came back, they were changed, different people. Angry, a little mad. Like madness mad. Not all right in the head anymore.”

  Eve stared at the cave wall, lost in her story. “Something happened on Napori, obviously, but no one knew what. It had to do with that elevator on Napori. They found it and used it, and something went wrong. Vik’s friend was more affected at first. … they’ve never let all the details out, but Vik’s friend eventually died. Vik was devastated, and he started to get even angrier, crazier. Then, Dr. Waldo got wind of it, started putting the pieces together, and he started investigating.

  “What he discovered shocked everyone.

  “As it turns out, there was an entity … hard to describe it … a thing, not really one entity but not really many separate entities, either. Anyway, its existence was somehow tied to that elevator. We don’t really know how elevators work, but obviously they somehow fold space and time, maybe work with black holes or wormholes, we don’t quite know. But somewhere in all the workings was something Dr. Waldo started calling The Void.

  “The Void is probably as old as time. It seems to be able to hibernate indefinitely until it finds a source of nourishment. When people use elevators
, they open doors or gateways, provide The Void access to the universe. And when that first man on Napori opened up an elevator, it seems The Void discovered—maybe rediscovered—that it thrives on people’s feelings of isolation and loneliness.”

  “It eats loneliness?” asked Emma. “How is that possible?”

  “Not so much loneliness as the chemicals created in the brain when a person feels isolated or lonely, disconnected from others. To The Void, this chemical is like chocolate to you humans. It communicates sort of telepathically, like voices in your head, so people don’t even realize their minds have been invaded. People just think they’re hearing voices, voices that encourage them to do things that end up isolating them.

  “On Napori, people had already begun the process themselves, without realizing it. The society had become more and more individualized, people living apart, working long hours, forgetting about art and creativity in their drive for success and money. It was easy for The Void. It slipped right in and took over where people had already started. Napori now is completely infected. Everyone’s isolated, everyone’s alone. We’ve sent specialists to try to turn things around, but it’s difficult. You can’t kill The Void. All you can do is change people’s behavior and actions. Things like dance, like singing. Innovation. Connection. Getting together with friends. Meeting new people. Seeing movies and making art. Playing. Those are deadly poison to The Void, and it’ll leave of its own accord. But once that isolation slips in, it’s hard for people to remember that they can make changes. They have to step outside their comfort zone. It’s hard.

  “Anyway, Dr. Waldo is pretty sure Vik is infected, and is helping The Void. The Void doesn’t have a body, really, so it can only get into people’s minds and make them do things. And The Void hates the Hub. The Hub is keeping The Void from spreading as freely as it would like, and The Void wants the Hub destroyed.”