The Sister Paradox

by Jack Campbell

“Hold on.” I got up and started walking around, unable to sit still for this story. “We? We’ve got to get these objects? Who says?”

  Kari hopped up from her footstool and stood in front of me. “It is very simple. I am one of those things which holds a tie to my home. I can cross from here to Elsewhere because I really belong here, but I have been living in Elsewhere so I belong there, too.”

  I nodded. “My sister lives in a world of her own, but she can visit this one.”

  “Exactly so! But how can I recognize the inanimate things from here that have slipped into Elsewhere when I know nothing of here? You must come with me so you can identify them.”

  That didn’t sound too hard. “But why me?”

  “Because you are my brother! I could not bring a stranger along. The walls would not let anyone else pass through with me.”

  “Wouldn’t me being in Elsewhere hurt the walls even worse?”

  “The Archimaede told me that when something new arrives it at first has little effect, only later growing more dangerous. Since our quest must be completed quickly, you should not be in Elsewhere long enough to cause a problem.”

  Something else was bothering me. “Kari.” I raised a forefinger for emphasis and spoke slowly. “I met you about an hour ago for the first time. Just how do you define stranger?”

  “Liam.” She shook her head. “Would you know a stranger when you first laid eyes upon them?”

  “Well, maybe not. What happens if we don’t do this?”

  “The walls between our worlds will fail. I do not know exactly what will happen then. The Archimaede said it would be terrible.”

  I thought about that. “Our two worlds coexist in the same space, but the walls keep them separate. So if the walls fail, our two worlds will both be here in the same space. Two universes, occupying the exact same space.”

  “Do you know what will happen?” Kari asked.

  “Yeah. I think so. A really, really, really big explosion.” An explosion big enough to annihilate two universes. That would make a cool special effect, but the real thing wouldn’t leave anyone around to enjoy the spectacle. “If your Archimaede is right, we do have to get this done.”

  It wouldn’t be that bad, would it? Go to some place with elves and wyverns and stuff and pick up a few things. Cool. Why not? How dangerous could the place be if Kari had lived there all of her life? “Does everybody have swords in Elsewhere?”

  “Almost everyone,” Kari agreed. “No one would leave home without their sword at hand.”

  Aha. And her sword had all those golden decorations and that big, fake jewel in the hilt. Swords must be like friendship bracelets here and all the girls in her nowhere wore them. Girls and their fashion stuff.

  Besides, Kari didn’t really belong here, and she wasn’t going to leave unless I agreed to this. I mean, Mom had been really upset. And Mom had sided with Kari even though I was the kid in this family, which just showed how much Kari being here confused things. I had to get rid of Kari for Mom’s sake as well as my own.

  I thought I heard James saying “sometimes the world does not revolve around you.” Well, maybe the world didn’t revolve around me, but this house did. What was so wrong about wanting things to stay that way?

  All I had to do was go with Kari, get the stuff we needed, see some cool things, and then leave Kari back in her own little world to annoy everybody there instead of annoying me here. It sounded like a good plan. Well, at the time it sounded like a good plan. How was I to know that Kari had left out a few important details? “How do we get to this Elsewhere place?”

  “It is not hard if you know the way,” Kari said eagerly. “But we will have to walk. Unless Mother knows a unicorn! Does Mother know a unicorn?”

  “Uh…no. We don’t even know, I mean, have a horse.”

  “Oh. A horse would not work anyway because horses would panic in the place between worlds,” Kari explained.

  I should have keyed on that little revelation, like wondering what would make horses panic in that place between worlds, but I was too busy being satisfied with my clever plan to get rid of her.

  “Surely you don’t walk everywhere?” Kari asked.

  “No. Mom’s car takes us places.”

  “Car?” Kari looked puzzled. “Is that a creature of some kind?”

  “No. Cars are made of metal and stuff.”

  “Metal? But it takes you places? Is a car a magical thing?”

  I laughed. It was funny seeing Kari talking one minute about what sounded like high-end physics and the next minute being confused about the simplest things. “Magical? Not even. The ads say they’re magical, but that’s not true.”

  “Ads? These ads are not truthful?”

  “Not really,” I said. “They lie all the time.”

  “Thank you, dearest brother,” Kari said solemnly. “I appreciate your warning me of the dangers of your world. I will remember if we should encounter any of these ads to be wary of them. Are they common? Are we likely to encounter any ads?”

  I wasn’t sure what she was talking about this time. Dangers? “Ads? Of course we’ll run into ads. They’re everywhere. This house is full of them.”

  “Everywhere!” Suddenly, Kari looked worried, glancing around. “This house is full of these ads?”

  “Yeah. Every house is. I’m sure there’s a bunch in this room.”

  “In this room?” Kari backed toward the nearest wall, looking rapidly from side to side. “Where? Are there any nearby?”

  I looked around the room. “I don’t…oh, yeah.” There was a magazine face down on the coffee table, and the back cover had one of those buy this and you’ll be rich and happy advertisements. I pointed. “There’s an ad.”

  “Where?” Kari jumped backward, drawing her sword in a flash and looking wide-eyed in the direction I’d pointed. “Where is it?”

  “On the table—”

  “They are invisible! And dishonest!” She was holding the hilt of her sword with both hands, the point leveled in the general direction of the coffee table.

  “No, no! Wait a minute.” I stayed well away from the sword, hoping that Mom wouldn’t pick that moment to walk into the living room. Maybe that sword was just a fashion accessory, but the edges and point looked pretty sharp from where I stood. “Ads aren’t dangerous. Not unless you believe them.”

  Kari kept her sword out and gave me a skeptical look. “You are certain?”

  “Yes. Really. You can put that away. Please put that away.”

  She slowly straightened and put the sword back into its scabbard with one smooth gesture that impressed me despite myself. “I am not sure how you manage to live in a world overrun with invisible creatures who are always trying to deceive people,” Kari said.

  “I guess you get used to it.”

  “I do not see how.” Kari settled her sword and nodded to me. “Are you ready to go?”

  “Go? Now?”

  “Yes, now!” Kari insisted “Our time is limited! The walls between worlds are strained! We must go and begin finding the objects!”

  Chapter Three

  Through the Wall of Worlds to Elsewhere

  “We can’t just walk out without telling Mom!” Though I wasn’t sure what I’d tell her. I’m going for a walk to another world? It has something to do with saving the universe, I think, but it doesn’t sound dangerous?

  You have to admit that it didn’t sound dangerous then.

  Mom’s aggrieved voice floated into the living room. “You kids stop arguing!”

  “Okay, Mom,” I called back softly. Then I glared at Kari. “See what you did?”

  “I did not! What are you talking about?”

  I held up my hands in a shushing motion. “When Mom uses that voice it means she’s got a really bad headache.”

  “Oh.” Kari nodded sympathetically. “And you say you have no unicorn to assist. Should we then call on a healing mistress, or do you have potions already here?”

  “Uh…we’ve
got, uh, potions handy, yeah,” I said. “Aspirin.”

  “As-prin? It is powerful?”

  “Yeah. Extra-strength.”

  “That is well.” Kari looked worried. “Are you certain it is not the work of an enemy? A curse perhaps? Does Mother have enemies?”

  “Not that I know of.” None that could hurl curses, anyway.

  “That is good to hear. Still, I am concerned. What could have caused our honored mother to have a serious headache?”

  “Maybe having a fourteen-year-old daughter show up out of nowhere had something to do with it?”

  “Elsewhere. I have been in Elsewhere. Why can’t you get it right?”

  “I’ll try. Just wait a sec. Mom? Uh, Kari and I are going for a little walk. Okay?” Hey, it was the truth.

  “Okay, Liam,” Mom replied. I gestured to Kari and we started to go, then Mom spoke again. “Liam?”

  “Yeah, Mom?”

  “Make sure you bring your sister back with you.”

  Rats. “Sure. No problem. Later.” That complicated things. I still wanted to ditch Kari, but now if I did Mom would probably get all upset at me even though I couldn’t very well bring back my sister when I didn’t even have a sister to begin with. Mothers don’t always pay attention to simple logic like that.

  Then again, if Kari decided she didn’t want to come back, it wasn’t like I could make her come home with me. Now that I thought about it, Kari hadn’t said anything about staying here. Why would she want to stay here if she really lived in a place with elves and unicorns? The thought cheered me up quite a bit. “Okay, I’m ready.”

  “Just a moment,” Kari said as she rapidly braided her hair and pinned it up. How do girls do that? “I like my hair down usually, but I must be ready in the event we are threatened,” she explained.

  Only one word of that had registered on me. “Threatened?”

  “Threatened,” Kari confirmed as if that were the most natural thing in the world.

  Again, a pretty clear clue that I should have paid attention to, but didn’t. Afraid that Mom might hear words like “threatened” and stop us from leaving, which would stop me from ditching Kari back in Elsewhere, I gestured for quiet, then pointed Kari out the back door. She slipped through the kitchen so quietly that I couldn’t even hear her moving. Nice trick. I stared for a moment, not wanting to admit that I’d been impressed again. By the time I caught up, Kari was standing in the backyard, glancing around, biting her lower lip. She pointed off to one side and started walking. I hustled to catch up as she warbled something to the sparrows, who chirped back at her.

  “How do you do that?” I asked her. “Talk to birds?”

  “It is because I have been Elsewhere. The Archimaede says many people have abilities like that, but in their own worlds they never develop them.”

  I wondered what special ability I might have had. Nothing to do with math, judging from my experience in this world. “What do you talk to birds about, anyway?”

  Kari grinned. “All kinds of things. The birds can see in your bedroom window, you know.” She giggled, while I felt my face getting warm. I mean, it’s not like I have all these big secrets, but I still didn’t want to have to worry about a bunch of birdbrains spying on me.

  Kari talked on, walking far enough ahead of me that she hadn’t noticed me flinch. “But the birds also like to talk about the world, about the patterns of life around them. And they want to hear about us. They see us all the time, doing things, and they want to know why we do them and what the things mean.”

  “Huh.” As far as I was concerned, the birds should mind their own business. Whatever I was doing in my own room and why I was doing it was my business. I gave the sparrows a hostile look as we passed by them, then almost tripped over a tree root as I followed Kari. She went around another tree and then another. That made three trees and the last time I’d looked we only had two in the backyard. I looked back toward the house and could see nothing but more trees behind us. “Where’d the house go?”

  Kari didn’t look around. “We are going to Elsewhere. The house is not in Elsewhere.”

  That made sense. I guess. Elsewhere sure had a lot of trees, though. I began to wonder how I’d be able to find the objects we were looking for if they were all scattered around a forest like this. “Should I start looking for stuff?”

  This time Kari paused and gave me a warning glance. “We are not even close to being there. But you ought to speak more quietly.” Instead of that annoyingly cheerful voice I’d been hearing most of the time since meeting her, Kari sounded serious. Like she was in charge. Like she had the right to give me orders.

  So she thought she’d get to run things, huh? I’d have to set her straight on that. “Why?”

  Kari frowned because I hadn’t bothered keeping my voice down. “Quietly, please, Liam. Basilisks haunt the walls between worlds. I really don’t want to attract their attention and neither do you.”

  “Basilisks?” My voice got a lot quieter. I’d had an argument all ready to go, but that argument hadn’t contained anything about what I’d thought were mythical monsters. “Actual basilisks? They’re real?”

  Kari looked at me like she couldn’t believe I was seriously asking the question. “Of course they are real.”

  “The kind of basilisks that are giant snakes and turn anyone who looks at them into stone?”

  “That is the only kind of basilisk there is.” Kari raised one finger to her lips in a shushing motion and beckoned me onward.

  Okay, if there were real basilisks running around, or rather slithering around, then maybe it wouldn’t hurt to let Kari run things just a little. That was when I first started to suspect that this little quest of Kari’s wouldn’t be quite the cake walk I had expected. But I would never have guessed what was in store for us. Like that dragon, which we will get back to, I promise, even though I’m not personally in any hurry to get back there.

  The forest had started out feeling sort of like a park, with regular-looking trees, grass on the ground, and everything pretty open. But as Kari continued walking it kept getting wilder and wilder until the trees loomed up on all sides, very tall and with trunks so thick it seemed as if nobody had ever cut down a tree here. The grass got wild and patchy, with bigger and bigger bare areas where nothing but fallen branches and leaves covered the ground. Every once in a while, a bird would flit down and chirp something to Kari, and then she would head off in a slightly different direction.

  Birds didn’t seem like a good substitute for GPS. I hauled out my phone and popped it open to check our position, only to find an “out of area” notice and no signal bars at all. How had we left cell phone reception behind so fast?

  I pocketed my phone again, figuring that it wouldn’t be very useful on this trip unless I wanted to listen to music I had downloaded, and with Kari so worried about noise I didn’t think this would be a good time for that.

  We kept walking, and our surroundings got creepier and creepier. The air felt heavy, and it seemed to somehow be thicker as well, absorbing light so that it got hard to see far in any direction. There wasn’t any breeze at all, but the trees and branches would still occasionally shift and groan as if in a strong wind. I started to get a strange feeling that the ancient trees all around were watching us, and not in a good way. If you’ve never run into hostile trees before, I can tell you that it’s pretty nerve-wracking.

  As a matter of fact, it felt a lot like being at a store and having the security guard decide you’re bad news, so he follows you around waiting for you to make a wrong move so he can bust you. I wasn’t at all sure what the trees were guarding, but whatever it was I somehow felt pretty certain they were just waiting for me to do the wrong thing so they could drop a hammer on me.

  I started to wonder if maybe the trees actually were guards of some kind and we weren’t supposed to be walking through this forest. Or maybe we had to stay on some special path that only Kari could see and the trees were waiting to see if I took
a wrong turn.

  As if unfriendly trees weren’t enough to worry about, vague shapes were moving around just far enough away to be lost in the gloom under the huge trees. Every once in a while, one of the shapes would come close enough that I could almost make out the figure of something that somehow seemed really dangerous, but then it would fade back into the murkiness again. After several of these almost-encounters, I heard what sounded like the padding of heavy paws right behind us and jerked around to look backward with my heart racing. But there wasn’t anything there that I could see, just the formless shapes in the shadows and those trees watching us.

  All right, I know that sounds weird. But those trees were watching us. And I’d had about as much of this as I could take.

  “Kari!”

  She hadn’t looked back in a while, but now she spun around and glared at me. “Liam,” she whispered. “I told you we have to be quiet. You are making so much noise as it is—”

  “I’m being as quiet as I can!” I hissed back at her.

  “You sound like a herd of stampeding trolls!”

  “Well, excuse me, Miss Robin Hood, but I never learned how to sneak silently through jolly Sherwood Forest!”

  I could tell Kari was getting ready to snap at me again, but she stopped and gave me one of those looks instead. “Why did you call me Robin? And why do you think this forest is named Sherwood?”

  “I didn’t! I—”

  “We have to be as quiet as if we are hunting,” Kari insisted. “Move silently or else something will come hunting us.”

  “Kari, look, I don’t know how to walk as quietly as you in the forest. I don’t know how to hunt.”

  “You are joking again.” She searched my face, her expression disbelieving. “Almost everyone knows how to hunt, and even those who do not hunt know how to move quietly through the woods so as to avoid any danger stalking them. How could you get to your age without learning those things?”

  My mouth opened, but no sound came out. Eventually, I shut it again and glared at her before I finally thought of an answer. “It’s not something kids learn in my world. Well, some do, but a whole lot of kids don’t.”