Imaginary Numbers

by McGuire, Seanan

  The bullet had found a home squarely between the eyes of a large male cuckoo, opening a hole through which clear fluid was already beginning to leak. His eyes went comically wide before he crumpled, motionless, to the ground.

  “Artie, I’m sorry, but we need to run,” said Antimony, looking frantically around as more and more cuckoos turned in our direction.

  “She didn’t have to miss.”

  “What?”

  “Sarah didn’t have to miss.”

  “Yes, I’m sure your cousin who’s gearing up to unmake reality was being kind to us, now can we go?” demanded James.

  I kept my eyes on Antimony. The cuckoos had noticed us, but they weren’t moving yet: we had a few seconds. “You’ve been on the range with Sarah. She’s not the best shot, but she doesn’t miss at this sort of distance.”

  “I’m wearing an anti-telepathy charm,” said Antimony. “She can’t see me.”

  “She can’t read you, but she can see you. And I’m right here. She missed us because she didn’t want to hurt us.” I needed her to understand. The words weren’t obeying me. No matter how hard I tried to make them, they weren’t obeying me. “It’s still Sarah in there.”

  “Artie—”

  “I can hear her. It’s still Sarah. Let me try.”

  Antimony looked into my eyes for one long, frozen moment. Then she nodded, mouth twisting into a resigned smile.

  “We’re surrounded and doomed anyway. If you think you can try—try. We’ll hold them off.” She shoved the gun into her waistband as her hands burst into flame and she shouted, “All right, you telepathic assholes! You want a piece of this?”

  “Oh, joy, this is precisely how I wanted to die,” muttered James. The temperature around us dropped precipitously.

  I spun on my heel and dove into the nearest ring of cuckoos.

  It was hard not to be angry with Annie for shooting at Sarah. No: it was impossible not to be angry with Annie. I wanted to shake her and scream and demand to know what she thought she was doing, how she could take that kind of risk with Sarah’s life. Except for the part where I knew what she thought she was doing. She was doing what we’d all been taught to do since we’d been old enough to listen to Mr. Rogers and go looking for the helpers: she was trying to minimize the potential loss of life.

  If Sarah finished the equation that would tear a hole in the wall of our dimension, that was the ball game. Everyone would die, except for the cuckoos, who would move on to their next target, a fresh new world ready for devastation. I couldn’t even try to convince myself that Sarah would find a way to stop them—that she’d be the small, clear voice at the center of the chaos, teaching the rest of her kind how to care—because the equation would have already burned her brain out, leaving her dead if she was lucky, and at the whim of the other cuckoos if she wasn’t. They weren’t a species of natural caretakers. They wouldn’t be good to her.

  Antimony had been doing the job we’d all been raised to do. And I . . .

  I was following the example that had been set for me by my parents, and by my grandparents, all the way back to the moment when Alexander and Enid Healy had decided to leave the Covenant of St. George behind. I was risking everything I had and everything I knew on the slimmest chance that I could save the woman I loved.

  A hand seized my wrist, followed instantly by the crushing pressure of another mind attempting to assert its domination over mine. I turned my head. Even that was difficult, like pushing my way through thick honey. The cuckoo who had hold of me didn’t want me to move. Didn’t even want me to keep breathing.

  Thank you, Great-Grandma Fran, I thought, and looked upon the face of a woman who was so close to identical to Sarah that they could have been twins. Even their eyes were the same shade of blue.

  Unlike Heloise, there was no mistaking this woman for Sarah. She was immensely pregnant, her belly openly declaring her condition to anyone who saw her.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” she said, in a calm, pleasant voice.

  “I’m not supposed to be here,” I echoed, despite my best attempts to keep my mouth closed. The thick honey feeling of the air around me was getting stronger. It said that I should listen to what this woman wanted. She was so clever and so beautiful and so much more important than I was; it was really unreasonable that I would dare to interfere with her plans, which I couldn’t possibly understand, with as weak and worthless as I was—

  I laughed. The woman recoiled, not letting go of my wrist. The feeling of moving through honey receded, enough for me to hear the sweet sound of several cuckoos screaming.

  “Second-degree burns or frostbite, which do you think?” My tongue was thick and heavy in my mouth. Every word was an effort. A worthwhile effort, at least: with each one, I could feel her hold on me slipping. She didn’t know how to handle a target that could fight back.

  Her eyes narrowed, threads of white lashing through the blue of her irises. “Your friends are troublesome,” she said. “They’ll disrupt our work. That’s inappropriate. You have to stop them.”

  “Oh, they’re not my friends. They’re my family. We’re really big on family where I come from.”

  The woman blinked, once, before offering me a truly radiant smile, wide and bright and oddly serene. “Ah. Family. That’s what matters to you. Well, then, I think you should know that I’m Sarah’s biological mother.”

  I blinked, once. Then, before the air could harden around me again, I slammed my forehead into hers so hard that I heard bone crack. I just hoped it wasn’t mine.

  The woman cried out, a sharp, startled sound, and staggered a step backward, losing her grasp on my wrist as she raised one hand to her forehead. Her eyes were watering and perfectly blue, with no sign of telepathic activity.

  “You don’t get to be her mother now,” I snarled. “You gave birth to her and you left her. That wasn’t even adoption. That was . . . that was forcing someone else to do the hard work of being a parent for you. And then they died, they died, and you didn’t come back. You let us take her in. You let us love her. That was adoption, that was a choice, and we made it, and you don’t have any right to take it back. She’s not yours. She’s ours.”

  The woman put a hand over her stomach, staring at me with pure loathing. “You have no right to judge us by the laws of your species.”

  “I don’t know.” Another cuckoo screamed somewhere behind me. Without their telepathy to help them target Annie and James, they were learning the hard way that sometimes it’s a good idea to take a self-defense class. “It sort of feels like you’re judging us by the laws of your species, all the time. You gave Sarah up. Not for her benefit. For your own. Also, it’s the laws of my species that tell me it’s not okay to beat up a pregnant lady, so maybe you should try to be okay with that.”

  An oak two-by-four slammed into the side of her head. She staggered for a moment and then fell, landing heavily on her side, one arm curled around the vast swell of her belly.

  Mark dropped the plank next to her. “My species doesn’t have any laws about letting women go unscathed just because they’re gestating,” he said. “Maybe we should, but I’m not the one who set the standards.”

  I gaped at him. “You’re here. We—”

  “You left me in Beaverton. Believe me, I noticed. But I’m a quick thinker and things got really confused and distracted when you stole the princess; I survived, no thanks to you.”

  “Um.” Something shattered in the distance. Given that James was still in play, I was pretty sure it was one of the cuckoos. “I’m sorry about that.”

  “I would have done the same thing to you.” Mark shoved his hair out of his eyes and glared at me. “You need to end this. We’re almost out of time.”

  He wasn’t wrong about that. The air was growing thick again, not like honey this time, but like it had been saturated with electricity. This was
the weight of a storm getting ready to descend, and I didn’t need to be psychic to know that we didn’t have long before whatever was about to happen was too far along to be stopped.

  I turned and resumed wading through the cuckoos—what was left of them. Most had rushed off to confront Annie and James, apparently trusting the woman who claimed to be Sarah’s biological mother to stop me. There was another scream behind me, followed by a shout of pain. This time, I recognized the voice. Annie was in trouble.

  Annie could take care of herself. I kept forcing my way forward until Sarah was right in front of me, her eyes glowing white, her hair floating several inches above her shoulders and belling out around her head like a corona, like she was underwater and no longer subject to the precise rules and regulations of gravity.

  Lymph was still leaking from her nose, ears, and eyes, adding a damp slickness to her face. Her eyes were blazing white, so bright I couldn’t look directly at them. And still her hands were moving, swiping through the air, moving things I couldn’t see into place.

  I didn’t allow myself to hesitate. Hesitation wasn’t going to help us now. I stepped up in front of her and grabbed her wrists, stopping her hands. She turned to stare at me, and I fought the urge to shut my eyes against the brightness.

  You are interfering, she said.

  “I’m here because I need you to stop before you destroy the world,” I said.

  The equations must be finished.

  “No, Sarah. You need to stop, and let them go, and come home.”

  The equations will be finished.

  Her voice was a roar of silent thunder, bouncing back and forth inside my skull, echoing off of everything. It was almost impossible to fight the urge to clap my hands over my ears and stop the headache. I forced myself not to move.

  “Sarah. Come on. Come back to me. You’re better than this. You’ve always been better than this. None of these people are worth dying over. None of them are important enough to let them make you a monster.”

  Let me go.

  I took a deep breath. “Make me.”

  Her eyes flashed white, bright as dying stars, and the air grew even thicker. I dropped her wrists and wrapped my arms around her, pulling her into a tight embrace, creating as much skin contact as possible.

  I love you, I thought, as loudly as I could.

  She didn’t pull away. She didn’t put her arms around me, either, and I found myself thinking about Mark, which was stupid. Here I was with my arms around the girl I loved, holding her, maybe for the last time, and I was thinking about Mark.

  Mark. Who had managed to come out of his first metamorphosis and into his second instar without killing his parents, because his sister had managed to keep him distracted until his mind had time to assimilate all the information that had been dropped on top of him. All he’d needed was time. Once he had that, everything else had fallen into place. He was still a cuckoo, but he was a new kind of cuckoo, not psychically non-receptive like Grandma, not intentionally modified like Sarah, but . . . new. He might be the closest thing to a real Johrlac we’d ever seen. His sister had, however accidentally, helped him through that transition.

  Maybe I could do the same for Sarah.

  I pulled back without letting go, just far enough to look into her burning eyes.

  “I love you,” I said, aloud this time, and leaned forward and kissed her. I felt her take a short, sharp breath, her lips parting against mine. Then she was kissing me back, and everything was white and everything was burning and everything was white and everything was burning and everything

  * * *

  This time, when the endless whiteness formed around me, I was standing in front of Sarah, almost close enough to reach out and touch her. That was nice, considering I knew our bodies were still tangled together back in the real world. I was a little disappointed not to still be kissing her. Kissing her had been nice, even if I wasn’t sure how much of it she’d actually been aware of.

  She wasn’t wearing the white dress here. Instead, she was wearing a long gray skirt and a shapeless green sweater, and her hair was hanging loose around her face, once more subject to the whims of gravity as the rest of us know it, and she had never in her life been more beautiful.

  A thin ribbon of clear lymph was running from the corner of her right eye and dripping down her cheek like a viscous tear. I bit my lip. Then I stepped forward and used my thumb to wipe it away, leaving a pearlescent smear behind. It was as thick as human blood, and as warm. It felt wrong. It felt . . . alarming.

  “Hey,” I said. “You pulled me into your head when I kissed you. That’s good, right? That means you’re still in control. Right?”

  Sarah shook her head silently, another bead of lymph gathering in the corner of her eye.

  “I’m not leaving you.”

  “Then we’ll both die,” she whispered.

  I hesitated before I asked, “If I stay in here and we both die, does the equation get finished? Do you destroy the world? Because that’s what they want you to do, you know. They want you to destroy the world. The whole thing. Movies and comic books and tomato plants and math.”

  “We’d take the math with us,” she whispered.

  “Fine. All that other stuff would be gone, though. Wiped right off the map. I mean literally wiped off the map. That’s another thing you’d be destroying: the map. No more maps. Seems a little excessive to me.”

  “Chocolate,” she whispered.

  “See, most people don’t think of destroying chocolate as a good thing. They like chocolate. They think it matters.”

  “Nasty stuff,” she said, with a flicker of humor. The bead of lymph fell, following the track of the last one down her face. “I don’t want to kill you.”

  “So don’t.” I shrugged. “Don’t kill me. Don’t finish their homework for them. We’ve coped with the cuckoos this far. We can put up with them for a while longer.”

  “I have to. My head . . .” She touched her temple with the tips of her fingers, frowning and wincing at the same time. “My head’s so full. It’s spinning. I don’t know what to do with a head this full. I have to let the numbers out. If I don’t, I think I’m going to explode.”

  “Let them out, then. Don’t solve them.”

  “I don’t have a choice.” Sarah lowered her hand and looked at me bleakly. “You can’t hear them. You can’t hear them begging me. This is what I was made for. This is what I was designed to do. I want to do it. I just don’t want to . . . I don’t want to.”

  The edges of her irises began to frost over, turning white again.

  I didn’t stop to think about what my actions would mean. I just stepped forward and grabbed her upper arms, pulling her toward me. Then, not allowing myself to hesitate, I kissed her again.

  Sarah’s eyes widened, and then she was kissing me back, her hands sliding around to cup the sides of my head, fingers weaving themselves into my hair. She’d never kissed anyone before this trip and neither had I, but she was a quick study and I followed her lead, holding her up as she melted against me, closing my eyes and kissing her like it was the last thing I was ever going to do. Which, if she planned to go ahead with destroying the world, it might be.

  It was worth it. Not worth the world being destroyed, but worth dying in Iowa, thousands of miles away from the rest of my family. It was all worth it if it meant that when I died, I was dying with Sarah. Not dying at all would have been better—way better—but I guess I always knew that we couldn’t win forever. That’s not how the universe works. Sooner or later everyone has to lose. Even the good guys.

  Sarah pulled back first, smiling wanly at me. “Why didn’t we do that years ago?” she asked.

  “You were in Ohio.”

  “Before Ohio.”

  “Before Ohio . . .” Maybe we could have changed everything if we’d just gotten around to making out b
efore Ohio. Before Sarah had followed Verity to Manhattan and broken herself against the unmoving wall of family loyalty, opening the door onto metamorphosis and instars and cuckoo women who wore her face like it was some sort of uniform, claiming to have some ownership of her just because they shared the same blood. Maybe.

  But maybe never really means anything except for “I have regrets,” and all the regrets in the world weren’t going to change where we were standing. “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess we were waiting for the right time.”

  “Is this the right time?”

  “You’re sort of about to do the big extra-credit math problem that unmakes the world, so if this isn’t the right time, it’s the only time we’ve got.” I shook my head. “This sort of sucks.”

  “I’m sorry.” She winced again, putting a hand against her temple. “I feel like I’m going to burst. Artie, I don’t think I have a choice about doing this equation. Now that it’s inside me, it has to come out. No one’s supposed to contain it for very long.”

  I hesitated, thinking of the cuckoos in their concentric rings, their eyes glowing like tiny stars. “Are the rest of the cuckoos helping you do it?”

  “I wish.” Sarah chuckled darkly. “They’re keeping it from getting away from me. It wants to spread itself. It’s like a disease. It wants to infect, so badly that it burns.”

  Mark and his accidental avoidance of homicide. The way the process of metamorphosis gave young cuckoos more and more access to their history with each instar, until they understood as much as they could about the structure of Johrlar, back before they’d been exiled, back before they became cuckoos.

  “The Johrlac came from a hive mind society,” I said, slowly.

  “What?”

  “The Johrlac came from a hive mind society,” I repeated. “Your ancestors, the ones who got kicked out and banished—they were a hive mind. I don’t know whether they had individual identities or not, but they did everything together. They could balance their data demands across multiple minds. Don’t you see? Deleting the information that it wasn’t safe to leave in their exiles wasn’t just a means of trapping them, it was a way to protect them.”