The Sister Paradox

by Jack Campbell

  “Liam! Liam!”

  I blinked. My head felt like I’d been kicked by a mule. Not that I’ve ever actually been kicked by a mule, but it felt like how I thought that would feel. And it doesn’t feel good. Not at all. Kari’s voice seemed far away, but getting closer.

  “Liam! Let go of me!”

  “No,” I mumbled. “Going to hold on.”

  “What are you talking about? Let go of me, Liam!”

  I finally managed to get my eyes working right again. I was lying on the cold stones of the mirror castle floor, my arms still locked around Kari’s waist. Holding tight to my sister’s waist… “Hey! Get off!” I broke my grip even though my hands were numb and scrambled away.

  “What were you doing?” Kari demanded. “Hugging me like that?”

  “Well, excuse me! I just went through all that and you’re giving me a hard time?”

  “All what? What did you just go through?”

  “You don’t know? You don’t remember?”

  “Remember what?” Kari waved one hand around and looked worried. “I can’t remember anything! I was looking in the mirror and then…then I was here on the floor and you wouldn’t let go of me!”

  “You didn’t feel anything? No pain?”

  “No.”

  This was So Totally Not Fair. I got the demon fire ant treatment and Kari didn’t feel a thing.

  But then Kari’s expression changed, and she stared at me with her eyes getting really wide. “I didn’t feel anything, Liam. I couldn’t feel anything. I remember that, now. I could see and hear, but nothing I saw or heard mattered. Do you know where I was?”

  “No.” I was still feeling more than a little put out over things.

  “I was in a place where all dreams are dead, Liam.”

  Something about her voice pulled me out of my sulk. Kari looked truly haunted by the memory. “Um, well, you’re not there anymore.”

  “How did I get out?” Her face brightened. “Did you rescue me?”

  “Uh, I guess so.”

  “That’s why you were holding on to me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, dearest brother, thank you. You don’t know…was it hard?”

  “Well…” Was it hard? Of course it was hard. Kari would never know how hard. I should tell her. In great detail.

  Or should I? Why tell her? She would never know how bad it had felt unless she went through it herself. Why, then? To make myself look good? Like I was some kind of hero when I had almost walked out of here and left her, when I had been scared to death of doing what any half-way decent guy would have done?

  How important was it that she know what I had gone through to rescue her? Or was it more important that I knew what I had gone through? And that I had succeeded?

  Next time a unicorn accused me of not being strong enough, I wouldn’t let it bother me, just you see. I knew better now.

  I shrugged. “It wasn’t that bad.”

  Kari looked at me with that very serious face for a moment. “If you say so.”

  “Hey.” I was trying to be the stoic hero here and I didn’t want her ruining it by acting sorry for me. “I said it wasn’t that bad.”

  “And I said if you say so,” Kari replied in a less sympathetic voice.

  “If you don’t believe me—”

  “Who said I don’t believe you?” Kari demanded.

  “You did,” I shot back.

  “I said ‘if you say so.’ I know what I said.”

  “That’s the same thing!”

  “No, it’s not!”

  “Yes, it is!”

  “Why don’t you just admit you’re wrong?” she yelled.

  I started to yell at back at her, then hesitated. “Wrong about what?”

  Kari hesitated as well, then frowned. “I am not sure. Whatever it is, we can fight about it again later when we remember and then you can admit you were wrong.”

  “How can you be sure I’m wrong when we can’t even remember what we’re arguing about?”

  “I just am!” Kari stood up, looking around, and gave a little shudder. “This is an awful place. Not as bad as the place where all dreams are dead, but bad enough because it leads to that place.”

  “Can we get out?” I was thinking of the monster again and wondering if it had heard us while we argued about whatever we had been arguing about.

  “I don’t know. Do you know where you came in?”

  “Yeah.” I came to my feet, too, feeling a little wobbly. Kari gave me a concerned look and I tried to stand steady. “I’m fine.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “I didn’t say you did.” I know a little while ago I had been thinking that sometimes it was nice to have a sister around, but this didn’t seem to be one of those times. I led Kari back the way I had come.

  Kari stared at the statues we passed. “I would be like them if not for you,” she finally said. “You do not have to tell me again. Did I thank you?”

  “I think so.”

  “You are a wonderful brother and a trustworthy companion.”

  “Uh huh.” Good thing Kari didn’t know how close I had come to bolting out of this tower and leaving her to an eternity of nothing. Well, not an eternity, I guess, since the universe would blow up tonight or tomorrow, but still.

  Kari put a wounded expression on her face at my reply though.

  “And you’re a wonderful sister,” I felt like I had to say.

  She smiled. Talk about mood swings.

  We came to where the mirror of the mirror stood. Inside it, we could see the gray-washed but still clearly colorful world outside. I pushed against it, but nothing happened this time. Same for Kari.

  “We have to get out,” I suggested, hoping for once she would listen to me. “Before the monster finds us.”

  Kari gave me a surprised look. “It already has.”

  I jumped backward, looking around frantically and giving a good imitation of how Kari had reacted to hearing my home was full of invisible ads. “Where? Where is it?”

  She pointed at the mirror. “Right here. This is what creates this world. This is what devours all of life’s meaning in here.”

  “That’s it?” I came forward cautiously, watching the mirror. “Is it alive? Is it intelligent?”

  Kari frowned in thought, shaking her head. “I doubt it. There is no feeling of purpose to it, only the knowledge of its task. It does what it has been made to do, you see?”

  That reassured me a little. “Somebody made it?”

  “Somebody or something,” Kari assured me. “Long ago. Whatever was bound into the mirror is ancient. Those the mirror was aimed at must have crumbled to dust long ago, yet it continues, because it knows only what it must do. Why never mattered to it.”

  “It’s like a weapon?” I asked, staring at the mirror.

  “Yes. Just so. A weapon that continues to work mindlessly. It is surely much older than this castle.”

  I came a little closer, peering at the worn engravings and once again being thankful that I couldn’t make out what they had once been. “Then why would this mirror be here? I mean, there?”

  “Those who lived in the castle doubtless felt the desire to have it near them,” Kari explained.

  “Doubtless? Why would they have wanted this ugly thing in their castle?”

  Kari had been studying the mirror, but now jerked her head over to look at me. “Did you not feel attracted to it?” she asked me with a surprised expression.

  “Nooooo. I only went near it because it felt like the thing that was sucking life.” Even though it was pretty stupid right now, I had to rephrase that statement when it offered such a great opening. “This mirror sucks!”

  “It does,” Kari agreed, not getting the joke at all. “You already said that. But your reaction is interesting.” Kari looked from me to the mirror and back again. “I felt a strong drawing to the mirror, a need to be close, yet so subtle that I did not realize it was being forced upon me from ou
tside until it was too late. The others here must have been lured inside in the same fashion. I feel it again now. The mirror realizes I have escaped the fate it bound me to, though it does not know how. It is…puzzled.”

  “You can understand this thing?” I asked, seriously creeped out.

  “I can sense its feelings,” Kari explained. “After so many years, it has encountered something new, and it does not know how to deal with it.” She turned a surprised look on me. “You confuse it. It does not understand you.”

  “Neither does Mom,” I said, “but how does that help us?”

  “It has not learned how to counter you,” Kari said. “The mirror’s lure does not work on you. It has not been able to force you into that place where there are no dreams. But it is trying to figure out how to do that, how to do to you what it did to me and these others.”

  That last sentence gave me a sinking sensation. Kari had seemed so confident about the mirror that I had been assuming she knew how to defeat it. I had a growing worry that if we stayed inside the mirror for much longer Kari would start going gray again, and I really didn’t want to suffer through another rescue. “Let’s not give it time to do that. The Archimaede never taught you how to escape when you’re trapped in a mirror?”

  “Not exactly, but he did teach me how to analyze problems.” Kari examined the thing carefully, looking at it from all sides, then stood back to gaze at the mirror, her chin resting on one fist as she thought. Finally, she turned to me. “There is great strength in this object, though I feel that its strength has faded with time. The dark enchantments once adorning the frame have been worn beyond recognition and no longer have any power. That which is bound into the mirror and traps us here is still too strong to defeat in a contest of pure will, however. Therefore, I can think of only one thing to do.”

  “What?” I kept my eyes on her, since I had learned to worry about the sort of things Kari regarded as reasonable courses of action.

  “We must break the ancient spell holding that which is bound within the mirror.”

  “We must?” That seemed to make sense. At least, it made as much sense as anything else that I had run into today. “How do we do that?”

  “By physically confronting the evil in this mirror with the strength of my own spirit.”

  That didn’t sound quite as sensible. “How do you do that?”

  “Like this.” Kari reached up and back and drew her sword, then reversed it so the hilt was forward. The great blue sapphire on the end of the hilt glowed like a star in the gray mirror-world around us. I suppose I was expecting her to start some magical chant or something. Instead, raising the weapon and bracing herself in a fighting stance, Kari slammed the jewel against the mirror before I could get my horrified yell out of my throat.

  Chapter Six

  Girls and Boys

  The mirror cracked under the blow. A very deep and very loud bell-tone boomed through the world around us. I flinched, clapping my hands over my ears, then almost fell as the entire mirror-world castle shuddered and shifted as if a big earthquake had hit. Ignoring all that, her face determined, Kari drew back her sword and slammed the sapphire against the mirror again.

  The cracks spread on the mirror, and as they did much bigger cracks suddenly appeared in the castle around us. The whole structure seemed ready to collapse, dust falling on us, as the shifting stone groaned like a creature in pain.

  “Three times breaks the charm!” Kari cried, slamming the jewel on the end of her sword hilt against the mirror a third time.

  The mirror shattered, shards flying off in all directions.

  I flung out my arms to protect my face as walls and ceiling of stone fell around us. The mirror-castle floor dropped out from beneath me as the structure collapsed into ruin.

  I felt a moment of pure panic, then my feet thudded onto a solid surface again with no more force than if I had dropped a few inches. I lowered my arms, wondering what I would see.

  And found myself standing back in the outside world again, facing the broken mirror. Kari glanced at the shards, then at the undamaged jewel in her sword hilt, then at me, and grinned. “The spell is broken, that bound within the mirror freed. It has returned into the nothingness from which it was once summoned. My plan worked.”

  “Good thing,” I said, trying to calm down as my body slowly realized that I wasn’t about to be crushed in a huge pile of rock. “What if it hadn’t?”

  “But it did.” Kari expertly spun the sword around in one hand and slid it into its sheath on her back with a melodramatic flourish. Show off. I guess she had earned it, though. “There is thought and there is action. The Archimaede teaches that both are needed. Do not act without thinking and do not think without acting. So he says and so we did. We thought the problem through, then we acted.”

  There was that “we” stuff again. Even though I couldn’t fault Kari’s logic, I was about to protest that I hadn’t been given any vote on the action. But before I could speak again we both heard sounds and looked around.

  The keep behind us was full of other people, blinking and staring at each other and us as if they were waking from a long, deep sleep. I recognized one of them. “Hey. He was in the mirror.”

  “They all were,” Kari said softly. “We freed them when we destroyed the thing.”

  It finally hit me that I had done something pretty cool. Faced the unknown monster, saved my sister, and did it despite my fears and a nasty dose of pain. And that had saved these other people, too. “Yeah!” I raised both arms in triumph. “I’m bad!”

  Kari’s eyes widened again, but this time in surprise. “Liam! You have done nothing bad. Your actions were good.”

  “That’s what I meant. When I said ‘I’m bad’ it meant ‘I’m good.’”

  “How can saying you are bad mean you are good?”

  “It’s a different kind of bad. It’s…” I saw the expression on Kari’s face. “Complicated, I guess.”

  Kari shook her head. “I see,” she said in a way that sounded like she didn’t see at all. “Very well, Liam. I must say your world is a very strange place.”

  “My world is strange?” I thought about abandoned castles appearing on the sea shore and dream-sucking mirrors. But Kari apparently thought that sort of thing was perfectly normal. “I guess it depends on what you’re used to.”

  Kari pointed to where the sun’s rays slanted in through a nearby window. “We spent a fair time trapped within that mirror. Having defeated the guardian, we must now redouble our search for the item it guarded, and swiftly.”

  But when we turned to do that we were confronted by the newly freed prisoners of the mirror. I felt a moment of panic, seeing how many there were, and how many of them had either swords or daggers at their belts. What if this were the accursed tower of a dark ruler who had been caught in his (or her) own mirror trap?

  None of them looked like orcs, though. As far as I knew, bad guys always had orcs working for them. And all of them were smiling at us.

  One, a woman more richly dressed than the others, stepped forward. “You freed us from the spell of the mirror?”

  Kari inclined her head toward the woman. “Yes. I am Kari, Spirit Daughter of White Lady of Eveness, and this is Liam, my Steadfast Brother.”

  “She Who Is Apart? The elven-born daughter of the unicorn!” the woman cried, then to my surprise she knelt before Kari, and so did the other people. “You have grown much beyond the toddling child I last heard you to be. We must have been enchanted unchanging in that accursed mirror for a ten of years at least. We cannot thank you enough for freeing us from the mirror and destroying the evil which empowered it. I am Lady Amelia Dudley, ruler of this keep. If there is anything we can do to repay you, any gift we can give you, just say it and it shall be yours.”

  “Rise, Lady Amelia and your followers,” Kari said as if people knelt before her all the time. “Fortune and a quest led us here. Your thanks are reward enough. We ask only your leave and assistance in sea
rching this keep for an object from my brother’s world.”

  Lady Amelia got up, nodding to me and not betraying any sign of being startled to hear that I was from a different world. “Certainly. But may I add that in addition to my other treasures, I have a daughter of marriageable age, who would be honored beyond measure to be matched with a hero of the stature of Liam the Steadfast.”

  Whoa. Apparently this ruler thought I was also of marriageable age.

  Kari gave me a sidelong look as she answered the ruler of the keep. “We are honored by your offer, Lady Amelia, but must hasten with our task lest disaster befall all our lands.”

  Lady Amelia bowed in return. “As you say, Lady, so shall it be. Everyone, harken to these heroes and to what object they seek.” As she waved her hand to emphasize her words, the sleeve on her arm fell back, revealing an object that looked suspiciously familiar to me.

  “Excuse me,” I asked. “Are you wearing a wristwatch?”

  The ruler looked down at her wrist. “My bracelet? What did you call it? It was given to me by those who found it. Since then I have worn it as a charm since it seemed a work of great skill and portent.”

  Kari stared. “Is that an object from your world, Liam? A watch like those you spoke of which holds hours within it?”

  “It measures hours,” I corrected, walking closer to the ruler and examining the watch on her wrist. “But it’s a lot nicer than any watch I ever had. This is one of those really cool ones that are mega-expensive. Not one of those cheap plastic digital jobs they give out in cereal boxes.” Everyone was giving me blank stares. “You know, it’s bling.” More blank stares. “Yes, it’s an object from my world.”

  Lady Amelia removed the watch, then offered it to me. “If you desire it, you may have it. Scant luck has it brought me, and I owe you all I have for freeing me and my people from the mirror’s spell.”

  I took the watch and tried to wave away the praise. “Kari’s the one who broke the mirror.”