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Rosalind Lutece hated herself. It was an unexpected and somewhat alarming revelation for a self-admitted narcissist. But there it was, hot and bitter and unapologetically angry. The hatred seemed to sit in her stomach and expand with every breath, numbing her extremities with tingling frustration, urging her to react.
A stern look won’t be enough, the Hatred said. A pithy retort won’t be enough. (Even though you are very witty.) You’ve shown the patience of a saint, but the time for patience is past.
“I’m leaving now,” said Robert.
“Yes, I can see that,” Rosalind said, glaring at him pointedly.
Damn.
“I’ll be back,” said Robert, as if there was some question of that.
“All right.” Rosalind reclined back onto the pillows piled against the headboard, propped her book against her raised knees, flipped it open, and pretended to read. In her peripheral vision, she saw Robert walk toward the bedroom door, vanishing before he’d gone through it.
He could be back already, of course. Time was a library, but Robert only wanted to reread the worst parts of his least favorite stories. He wanted to revise, edit, rewrite finished, published works. Rosalind did not, and he was punishing her for it. He was making her wait.
Rosalind threw down the book she was pretending to read, hurling it harder than intended; it rebounded off the mattress and hit the floor with a loud thud. They’d made a home of sorts here, in Lutece Laboratories, on May 15th, 1908 - a day she and her brother had been otherwise occupied in Finkton. As changed as they were, they were still mostly linear beings. They still needed to eat when hungry, drink when thirsty, sleep when tired. (Not doing so likely wouldn’t kill them in the sense that starvation and sleep deprivation could kill linear things, but the need was still there.) And it felt foolish to admit to herself, but there was no denying that she had trouble falling asleep without Robert near.
She could feel him, always. It was a constant pull; comfortable gravity when he was with her, a dull ache when he was gone, a sort of quantum phantom limb.
It had all been so fascinating once. Rosalind had never been a sentimental woman, but when she and her brother had died, when they had… dispersed… Rosalind could not recall ever having been happier. Granted, she had never been a particularly happy woman either. It was more accurate to call her content. Content and fascinated, stimulated, not lonely. All those things were better than merely happy. Happiness was unproductive. Robert, however, was unhappy. And his unhappiness was ruining everything.
There had been that frustrating business with Elizabeth to deal with. They still dealt with it, continuously. Rosalind had given Robert her word to assist him in the experiment - and an experiment is what it was, what it continued to be. If they could just fix one reality, perhaps others could be saved as well.
Rosalind thought it was all very silly, but she supposed it gave her brother hope. It seemed to give him direction, purpose. She tried to think of it more like a hobby and less like a pointless obsession.
Simultaneously, they were free to explore, to travel the world, the universe. Together they watched life pull itself up from primordial building blocks. They discovered species no other human would ever see: exotic creatures that existed in only one reality and no other. They studied their own eternal selves, scattered so thoroughly across so many possibilities that they were somehow immortal, invulnerable, and already dead.
And yet time still existed. They still experienced it, albeit in wildly varying capacities. Rosalind found their predicament endlessly fascinating. If Robert found it similarly fascinating, he found the act of satisfying the needs their state of existence left them with equally so.
“Try this,” he’d say while they stood in the streets, sat at a cafe, walked in the park in Thailand, in India, in America.
Rosalind would roll her eyes. She would reluctantly nibble at a spicy pepper or pinch off the end of a flaking dessert. “Can we not just have sandwiches for lunch?” she would ask while her mouth burned, while trying to brush powdered sugar off her blouse.
But Robert would insist on trying new things. “I try new things for you,” he would remind her, and he did. Robert was nothing if not adventurous.
“Try this,” she would say, while they sat with aristocracy, wearing masks and little else. He would lick the mousse from her fingers, eat the fruit from her hand. Rosalind had different appetites, and Robert was amenable to all of them. The secret clubs, the social gatherings based in hedonism and ritual.
“I had no idea you were religious, dear sister.”
“Oh, yes. Praise Aphrodite.”
“Dionysus, I think.”
“Him too.”
Sometimes Rosalind liked to watch. She liked the sea of flesh, the carnal competition of an orgy. Most of all, she liked the way Robert watched her back. She liked him flushed, breathless, subject to the ministrations of strangers. What did Rosalind have to be jealous of? She and Robert both felt the same inexorable pull. They orbited each other always, forever, past the puny scope of these other people.
Rosalind would lean back in an armchair or recline in a chaise lounge. She would act as an audience and let her hands drift downward. Once upon a time, she might have been mortified by such proclivities. What did she have to be embarrassed about in front of these people? If she so chose, she could witness every humiliating moment of their lives. They were less than a blink; they were a dot of color in a painting that spanned miles. And Robert… Well, Robert and she were the same.
She could have him to herself when the mood took her. In dark chambers she would light candles that illuminated the damp stone walls in a manner she found appealing. She would cross the room and tug on the heavy iron chains.
“Are you comfortable, brother?”
“Not at all.”
Rosalind would smile. Robert would return that smile with a small, amused one of his own.
“I have an idea for an experiment.”/”I would like to meet Sir Isaac Newton.”/”A bit drafty in here isn’t it?” Rosalind would ask conversationally, tipping the candle she held until Robert flinched and the wax dripped and dried on his back.
“Look at this.”/”What do you suppose that is over there?”/”I’ve found something positively barbaric.” Rosalind would nod to a torturous contraption in a corner or bring over some disused device she had discovered on a dusty table. “Should I use it?” she would ask, wrapping her arms around him from behind. The chains would rattle and he would gasp slightly at her weight as she draped barbed thongs of knotted leather down his chest.
“You could,” he would usually say.
Rosalind would wonder if that was true. Could she? She could bite him on the neck, until the blood ran down to the freckles on his shoulders. At the same time it dripped down, it dripped upward and never dripped at all. The skin would knit together and the distinct indentations of her teeth would fade. The probability of Robert being hurt by a woman who both was and was not himself was too low. Together they were impossible people.
Not that Rosalind wanted to hurt Robert. He was easily her favorite person in the known universe - which probably wasn’t saying much considering how few people Rosalind could tolerate. But she supposed she knew more of the universe than most, and if Robert was her favorite person in it, that said something. What that something was, she wasn’t sure, but it said enough.
“This feels… right,” she would say, straddling him on the floor of the observation deck on some commercial space ship. The iron chains would be replaced with both their ties. She would playfully knot them tighter and lean in close, looking down at him while he gazed up at her. She would splay her fingers on the clear floor. All around them were stars and darkness… and two sliding doors and, in all likelihood, an active security camera. Rosalind liked to clear her mind and pretend she and Robert were the only people in existence.
And then he would slip his arms over her head and pull her down, kiss her jaw, bite her earlobe. He would usually say something sentimental and Rosalind would roll her eyes even while she was trying to hide a smile.
But, here, in their bedroom Rosalind wasn’t smiling. Not even a little bit.
She switched the lamp off and rolled over onto her side. She closed her eyes, but sleep wouldn’t come. When she finally heard Robert return, she gave no sign that she was awake. What could she say that would make a difference?
The mattress dipped slightly as he climbed into bed beside her. With a weary sigh, he laid down. They were back-to-back in bed, and Rosalind was displeased - but at least she could sleep.
“Heads?”
“Or tails?”
“Heads,” said Dewitt and flipped the coin.
Rosalind gave the outcome a cursory glance before reaching to mark another tally. “Hmm. I’m running out of room. Mind if I erase the column for tails on this side?”
“I suppose not.” There was a petulant edge to Robert’s words that made it difficult not to veer straight from science into bickering.
“Alternatively, we could end the experiment here.” Rosalind said, raising her voice while endeavoring to sound put upon.
“Will you two get out of my way?” Dewitt asked when no one had said anything further for a moment. Rosalind, however, was preoccupied by her brother’s silence. Gaze fixed on nothing in particular, he wore the troubled expression he’d been assuming more and more often as of late.
“In all honesty, I have no real problem with this particular part of the experiment,” Rosalind offered. “This sort of data could prove valuable for any number of future, more realistic, endeavors.”
Meanwhile, Dewitt was trying to shoulder past the two and failing to do so against the immovable inevitability of them. “What the hell?”
Rosalind grabbed Robert by the wrist and led him off to the side and into a different time and place. “Let’s go for a drive,” she suggested, walking to the black convertible parked sideways across someone’s overgrown lawn. Rosalind didn’t care for transportation from this particular era. Hurtling along in a potentially explosive box stuck her as irresponsible. Her brother seemed to enjoy it, but there wasn’t much accounting for his taste; he also adored romantic comedies and wine coolers.
Robert tossed their chalkboard sign into the back and slid into the passenger seat, seeming in a sulk. Rosalind tried to take it in stride, brushing a couple of liquor bottles out onto the lawn before sitting herself down behind the wheel. The keys were in the driver’s side floorboard. She’d driven this car before. Robert usually drove, but he didn’t appear to be in the mood just now.
“Do you think we should use the word experiment in front of the subjects?” Rosalind asked as she rolled the car backwards, off of the lawn and onto the road. “Probably not,” she said, answering her own question as she put the car into gear and pressed the accelerator with her foot. “Realistically, I can’t see that it makes a huge difference, but… We’ve had this conversation, haven’t we.”
Robert said nothing. Out of the corner of her eye, Rosalind could see him leaning against the door.
“What is it you hope to accomplish exactly?” Rosalind knew they had had this conversation as well, but she had yet to receive a sensible answer from him on the subject. “As I’m sure you know, I was initially under the impression that our aim was to reunite Dewitt with his Anna… which we have done… repeatedly.” A car horn blared as Rosalind swerved onto the interstate. “There must be, at least, forty or fifty deific Elizabeths out there at this point. I keep expecting one of them to show up and tell us to stop, and I don’t like that. It leaves me just a bit… paranoid.” Rosalind slouched a little in her seat, suddenly suspicious of prying eyes. “We should find one and discuss the issue. Maybe she likes the company.”
Like I used to enjoy yours. Rosalind didn’t say it, but she hoped that it was implied. “So,” she said instead. “What are we trying to accomplish?”
For a few seconds, Robert remained silent. “I don’t know,” he said at last.
Rosalind believed him. “But you do have-”
“-a general idea of what I hope to accomplish, yes.”
“I’m almost afraid to ask.”
“Then don’t.”
“I said almost,” Rosalind took an exit that fed into a country road. It led nowhere particularly interesting. Rosalind just liked the way the countryside smudged green and brown - then blue, when they passed over the river. “You’ve been so glum lately, I’m afraid I’ll have to pry.”
“Doesn’t it ever bother you?”
“Your sulking about? Yes. Yes, it bothers me very much.”
“No, not that.”
“What then?”
Robert folded his arms over his chest and looked out at the passing forests and occasional road sign. He opened his mouth to explain but closed it, evidently rethinking how to begin. “I don’t… Doesn’t it- Have we ever actually helped anyone?”
Rosalind looked at her brother, puzzling the statement over in her head. The car drifted a bit, bumping over the ridges that outlined the road. “We helped Elizabeth.”
“Did we?”
“I should hope so, after all that.”
“Was our help equal to or greater than any misfortune we may have caused her?”
Rosalind exhaled loudly through her nose. “No, but what more could we do? Robert, if this is what’s bothering y-”
“It’s more than that.”
“Oh?”
“How many realities have we visited now do you think?”
“Quite a few.” Hundreds, at least.
Robert turned in his seat to look at her. “In how many of those did we - that is, our respective counterparts. How many times did we help anyone?”
“I’m not sure I understand the question.”
Robert shook his head in frustration, as if bringing it up had been a waste of time. “Mother wanted me to help people,” he muttered, leaning back in his seat again. “She wanted me to be a teacher or a doctor, something like that.”
“Really? Hmm… You know, I think I find it comforting to think that we both disappointed Mother.”
“I think disappointment would be a bit of an understatement.”
“Brother, we are brilliant physicists.” Rosalind raised a hand, making a sweeping motion toward the world around them. “Very successful ones, I might add. Just look where we are.”
“How nice for us.”
Rosalind put her foot down. The engine growled. Rosalind glared. “And what is that supposed to mean?”
“We’ve contributed nothing of value to the world.”
“We’ve accomplished plenty.”
“The world is a worse place for having us in it!” Robert raised his voice, startling Rosalind. She had never known him to do that often. “All of them,” he added with an emphatic gesture to the sky. “We help madmen. We steal children. We kill thousands - no, countless people, collectively. Indirectly for the most part, but we are integral. We hitch our wagon to tyrants, sell our souls for a chance to be taken seriously… You’re about to drive us off the bridge.”
He said the last part so calmly that it took Rosalind a few seconds just to realize he was warning her. The crash was a rather impressive one.
“It doesn’t matter,” sighed Robert, sitting between the dashboard and the window with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands. The car was almost vertical, hanging by the back tires while the front end pointed at the river. Rosalind had climbed up already and was leaning down to offer Robert a hand. However, he seemed disinterested in assistance.
“Suit yourself.” Rosalind grabbed the guard rail and pulled herself over the bridge. She didn’t much care for the idea of falling a great distance into cold, muddy water.
“We’ve wrecked more than we can possibly fix.”
“What?” Rosalind peered over the edge, but Robert appeared to be saying most of this to himself.
“There are just so many realities we’ve had a hand in worsening. What are we supposed to do? We can’t even fix our own.”
“Considering our present relationship with time, your uncanny ability to remain stuck in the past baffles me. It truly does.”
Robert looked up at her. “Do you think there exists some reality where we went back to normal after Elizabeth drowned Comstock?”
“I don’t know.”
“There must be, right? That must be what’s happening. By reuniting Dewitt with his daughter, we’re creating some new reality that we have no place in; not together, anyway.”
“Is that what you’ve been hoping to accomplish?” Rosalind’s chest tightened. The mere idea made her feel suddenly cold.
“No… I don’t know. It might be nice. I’m not sure it would be, but it might. I think part of the appeal might be in that; in the not knowing. Either way, it’s something to… What are you doing?”
“I am kicking the car.”
“I can see that. Why?”
“I want it to fall. You are depressing me.”
“It is a depressing state of affairs, Rosalind. I don’t see why you should be so angry with me. I hardly think-” but then the convertible lurched sideways, and even if it hadn’t fallen, Robert did. His incessant complaining turned into a startled yelp, which segued into an abrupt splash that Rosalind found less satisfying that she would have liked.
Rosalind left.
Despite the occasional dalliance in ritual for carnal reasons, Rosalind was not a religious woman; not really. Comstock’s convictions had never been her own, nor had she shared the beliefs of her family. Aside from the occasional musing on religion in its relation to physics, it was an issue that was usually far from her mind. Rosalind simply did not care.
Without Robert around, Rosalind actually found herself waxing metaphysically existential on occasion. If there was a Heaven for her, it was this. If there was a Hell, it was also this.
Robert came into their bedroom early one evening, the moment he had left in fact. These days, he almost always kept her waiting. Rosalind jumped when he immediately reappeared.
“I found something,” said Robert.
“Oh?” asked Rosalind, trying to mask her surprise with faked disinterest. He had caught her mid-eyeroll, having only just left.
Robert nodded, crossing the room and offering his hand to her. “Let me show you.” He seemed eager to do so. Rosalind did not trust that. She stayed in bed, clutching her robe shut as she narrowed her eyes at him. “Please,” Robert amended.
“What is it?”
“It would be faster to simply show you.”
“Robert, I am tired.”
“We will come right back.”
“Well, I’m not getting dressed.” Rosalind relented and climbed out of bed.
“You look just fine for where we’re going,” said Robert, giving Rosalind a warm smile she had nearly forgotten him capable of.
Rosalind put her slippers on. “Okay,” she sighed. “Lead the way.”
Where they were going was a small, cluttered room. The floral-patterned wallpaper was peeling, and there was no surface without books, notepads, and loose pages of neatly scrawled notes.
“Hmm,” said Rosalind, moving to the window in slippered feet. Below, she could just make out the awning of what might be a deli. “Is this one of mine?” she asked, referring to the room she had rented shortly before being sought out by Comstock. Spotting a roach in the corner and feeling a draft sweep up her nightgown, it was not difficult to recall why she had agreed to work for him.
“Yes,” said Robert. “It is one of yours.”
“The wallpaper is different… As are several other things. What am I here to see?”
“One of the differences.” Robert drew Rosalind’s attention to a chalkboard. He handed her a notepad and a dogeared tome with margins full of cramped print. Rosalind glanced over and thumbed through it all in annoyance… and then fascination.
Robert pulled over the room’s only chair, and Rosalind sat. “This can’t be right,” she said at last.
“I think it can. You are very clever.”
“We are very clever,” Rosalind murmured, stacking the notes and tapping them absently against the table while she thought. “And have you looked ahead? Did it work?”
Robert was near the window, peering down at the street below. “I can only speculate. They are gone. All of them… And, yes, I think it worked.”
An alternate dimension. Not just another reality. A universe. A blank slate with its very own laws. The Rosalind who had written these notes theorized that someone’s will alone would shape the terrain. The moment a living, thinking being entered, the void would gain form. It could not continue being nothing when something was there. “Or they’re all hovering, eternally, in a vacuum.”
“Oh, have some faith in yourself.”
Rosalind shrugged. “It’s not as if we’ll ever know, I suppose. Sounds like it was a one-way trip, regardless of the outcome… How exciting, though. Something we can never know.” She rose from the chair. “Are we ready to go home now?”
Back at Lutece Laboratories, Robert and Rosalind climbed into bed together. They said goodnight. They pulled up the covers. Rosalind switched the bedside lamp off, but did not sleep. She laid there awake, staring up at the ceiling, thinking. There was a reason Robert found his discovery interesting enough to share without delay. Rosalind thought she knew what that was but didn’t want to bring it up. She didn’t want to fight right now, didn’t want to give Robert ideas if, by some miracle, they had not already occurred to him.
“Are you still awake?” asked Robert.
“Mmm,” hummed Rosalind.
“You went through first.”
“Hmm?”
“You told Dewitt you had to. You told him there was a device you needed to take through and activate, to stabilize things. You lied.”
“How underhanded of us.”
“You made a universe.”
“Or I made nothing and led thousands into a fate worse than death… But let’s stay optimistic about this, shan't we?” She patted Robert on the arm before rolling away from him. “Good night,” said Rosalind - but even with Robert there, she did not manage to sleep well that night.
It wasn’t long before the inevitable happened.
“I’m going through,” said Robert.
“You most certainly are not,” said Rosalind.
“Can you help us move this piano?” said Dewitt. “At least get out of the way.”
“I’m going through,” insisted Robert.
Rosalind turned sideways on the bench. “No. You are not.”
“How do you propose to stop me?”
“Let’s just go around them, Booker,” whispered Elizabeth. It wasn’t necessary, Robert was walking away and Rosalind stood to go after him.
They walked into Lutece Laboratories. Not the Lutece Laboratories that existed on May 15th but a Lutece Laboratories housed in a warehouse, on a dock. The air was stale and smelled like fish. There were overhead lights, but none of them were on. Instead, Rosalind had to see her way by the sunlight coming in through the windows high on the walls. She looked through the drifting dust motes, to the fallen banners and deflated balloons. The floor was covered with confetti and other bits of garbage, the archaeological site of a celebration long past.
Rosalind’s gaze was drawn to a large metal arch in the center of the room. Surrounding it were panels and boxes full of wires, switches, swirling conductors, buttons. Surrounding all that was a wooden stage, like someone commissioned a centerpiece for a party and found out too late that the thing could not be moved.
Robert climbed onto the platform and walked around to the side of the device. He examined it only a moment before reaching out and flipping switches; disconnecting this, reconnecting that. Rosalind gave him his space for now. She stopped several steps from the stage. A flimsy wooden sign snapped beneath her heel. Samuel Will Guide Us, it read. Rosalind regarded the neatly painted words without much interest. Samuel was just another word for Comstock, surely. The universe was full of surprises and Dewitt was never one of them.
“You don’t know how it works,” said Rosalind, when she felt enough time had passed. “Even if it leads somewhere, there is a very real chance we won’t be able to return.”
Robert stepped away from the main console. “I’m still going.”
“No. You-” Rosalind stopped herself. She took a deep breath. “Why?” she asked instead.
Robert watched the machine and only the machine, really taking it in as he mulled over her question. “It’s an unknown,” he said at last.
The temptation was a strong one, Rosalind could not deny that. There were finite mysteries, and most of them already had solutions… somewhere. To have a mystery just sitting there right in front of you, with no way to solve it that did not involve substantial risk… Rosalind understood the urge to go through. Maybe if that was all she thought tempted Robert, she would not be quite so disturbed. “This could change us. It could even kill us. Assuming there is a universe on the other side, it is not our own. It is not one that contains us.”
“Us?” Robert sat on the edge of the platform. “We don’t both have to go through.”
“What?” Rosalind closed the distance between them in several purposeful strides.
“I think, sometimes, you forget that we are two people.”
Rosalind studied Robert then looked him in the eyes, considering. “You wouldn’t go without me,” she stated at last.
The corner of Robert’s mouth twitched. He glanced away. “Regardless, I’m going,” he said. “I am. I will have. I do go.”
“Now you’re just being needlessly confusing.”
“How do you want me to phrase it? I’m going.”
“Think it over.”
“I have.”
“Talk it over.”
“We are.”
“This isn’t fair!” Only when the words reverberated back to her several times over did Rosalind realize she had just shouted.
“I know,” said Robert, looking at her again. “I’m sorry.”
Robert seemed to mean that. Rosalind had rolled her eyes through too many ‘I’m sorry you feel that way’s and halfhearted apologies drenched in passive aggression to not take notice when her brother seemed genuinely apologetic. Of course, it didn’t make her feel any better.
Rosalind sighed and dropped down to sit on the stage beside him. She looked straight ahead, sitting in silence for a few minutes. “I’m happy,” she said finally, tone accusing.
Robert looked a bit puzzled by that statement, pausing to measure words against sentiment. “That’s… good?” he ventured.
“No,” Rosalind snapped. She hated it when they weren’t on the same page - something that happened more often than, honestly, she cared to admit. “It’s miserable, frankly. Do you remember when you gave me that book to read? The one about an abattoir?”
“I don’t know what you’re… Did you mean to say slaughterhouse?”
“Yes, yes. That’s it. Do you remember how you loved it and kept forcing it on me?”
“Love is a strong word. I simply found it relevant and entertaining. I thought you would feel similarly, but apparently you didn’t even read it.”
“I didn’t have the time.”
“How?”
Rosalind waved a hand impatiently. “You’re missing the point. But fine. Bad example. Juggling then. You love juggling, and-”
“I don’t love either of these things. I don’t even feel particularly passionate about them. ‘Enjoy’. ‘Enjoy’ is the word you’re looking for.”
“No!” Rosalind realized she was shouting again and struggled to lower her voice. “Imagine you love something then.”
“What?”
“Anything! Anything that you love and want to share. You feel very strongly about it, and want the person you are closest to to experience it as well. But they dislike it or are indifferent to it- Don’t smile.”
“I’m sorry. You’re just so bad at metaphors. Go on.”
Rosalind frowned. Robert understood her, she was sure. He wanted her to fumble through the words; she wasn’t sure why. “I am content. Often, I am happy. My life, right now, both excites and fascinates me… But you…”
“I’m unhappy.”
Rosalind breathed deeply and released a long, steady breath. Her hand drifted down next to her thigh and found Robert’s. They leaned against each other, Rosalind feeling an electric sort of release she expected Robert experienced as well. It felt good to actually say something. Between them, there existed a unique sort of self-denial.
Of course, there were things they suspected about each other that they wouldn’t discuss even now.
Rosalind looked over her shoulder, at the machine. “How will we get back?”
“I have my theories.”
As did Rosalind. “Well I won’t sit around dreading it.” She took them back, jumping first to a time when the machine jerked with sudden surges of electricity. With no one to turn the thing off, it had burned itself out. Rosalind took them back again - not too far, just a little - to the machine as it was on the day everyone must have left.
It was a lovely thing, the machine. Beneath the arch buzzed a wall of solid energy, serenely blue and enticing. Rosalind stood. Robert’s hand never left her own, and she tugged him to his feet.
Robert looked at, his eyebrows raised. “Now?” he asked, as if she might have taken them both here for some other reason.
“Yes, now.” Rosalind almost added an obligatory, ‘If you still want to go’ but found that her first impulse was to not. Now that she had announced her plans to go, she rather wanted to just take that leap and be done with it.
“Shouldn’t we pack a few things, or something?”
“Packing implies we will be away for some time. Either we can get back or we can’t, brother. If we cannot… Not having your favorite pillow will be the least of our troubles.” Rosalind walked forward, pleased to notice Robert dragging his feet just a bit.
They stopped less than a step away. The wall of energy crackled. Tiny stray tendrils of flickering electricity reached for them. Rosalind let her eyes roam the wall, the machine itself, everything. There was a very real possibility that, in a moment, she and her brother would cease to exist. (Leaving the universe. How foolhardy.) The idea of time once again being finite to her threw the most indescribable detail on everything; the texture of metal, the warmth of Robert’s hand, the sudden pressing importance of all the mundane questions she had, until now, considered too trivial to find answers for.
“Ready?” asked Robert.
Of course, Rosalind was not. She looked at Robert one last time and tried to find a few words, any words, that might be appropriate; a succinct set of words that both summarized their relationship and had a certain feel of finality to them. The words didn’t come. Rosalind nodded instead.
Robert took a deep breath. “All right,” he said and, together, they stepped forward and through the wall.
It was like a brief fall, like when Robert took hills too fast when driving and Rosalind felt as if everything inside her was hovering just for a second.
And then they were through. They were in another universe. It was that easy.
Rosalind had shut her eyes without realizing it, so physical sensations were the first thing she registered. Robert’s hand was still in her own. Good. And… there was a tug, like a sort of harness with its end fastened to her own universe. It felt reassuring. She opened her eyes.
Rosalind had ridden in the contraption that brought Columbia its “pilgrims”. (She had even helped build the thing.) She had taken more complicated modes of transportation higher, through the mesosphere. She had ridden elevators down into the earth and up into expansive, heavily guarded compounds. She had gone to sleep nestled in a coffin-sized box of electronics and awoken in a metropolis. She had gone out in the ocean and submerged herself in diving bells, suits, bathyspheres. She had heard different takes on the same welcoming spiel many times. She had seen countless cities revealed to her in a manner devised to steal her breath away. Rosalind was far too cynical to be overly impressed by any of it. But this? This surprised her.
“Oh,” said Robert. “That’s you.”
It was. Well, a Rosalind anyway; with hands outstretched, a Lutece didn’t seem to be greeting new arrivals so much as conducting an entire city. At least twenty feet tall and carved from white marble, it looked much like what Rosalind could see of the rest of the city. All of the structures were grand and white; they looked clean, sterile even. Rosalind liked the look of it, but not the feel.
It felt wrong.
“This place feels empty,” said Robert.
That too.
Rosalind released Robert’s hand to turn around. Behind them both, she saw the arch; within it, there was the same wall of energy. Rosalind raised a hand, hesitated, then touched it.
“Solid?” asked Robert.
“Seems so,” said Rosalind, giving the wall a firmer tap. That comforting tug was still there, though. The idea of being stranded wasn’t filling her with dread just yet. Rosalind followed the tug, moving as she would move through space and time. It was instantaneous, she was back in her own universe, just a few steps from the arch.
Beside her, Robert appeared. He took a moment to look around. “Hmm,” he said and vanished.
Rosalind followed her brother back to the universe beyond the arch. Now that her mind was at ease in regard to getting back, she could move on to more enjoyable things. “A theory,” began Rosalind. “There is no time here. The arch is only on because it was on at the moment of this world’s conception.”
Robert had gone to stand near the statue and was currently studying the plaque there. He stopped and looked back at her. “What about all the people?” he asked.
“There are several possibilities, I suppose. I doubt they built this city. It was likely dreamed up by the first person to come through… Which seems very bold of us, I must say.”
“But the people who came through must have lived here?”
“Perhaps. The arch is not functional from this side. We can leave, of course, but that’s very different. All those people could still live here. Somewhere. It is a very big city, and it doesn’t seem as if this place has taken on any late additions. Maybe we haven’t run into them yet… Or maybe linear creatures simply can’t thrive without time to be linear within. Maybe they died.”
“Or lived indefinite linear lives and have since moved on.”
“I suppose we shall just have to explore and see.”
“I’m afraid we’ve arrived after the proverbial party.”
“Well, it’s hardly the first time.”
“Lutetia.”
“Hmm?”
“It’s what this city is called. It says so on the plaque.”
“This is absurd,” said Rosalind. “I have to see more.”
There was quite a lot to see. The architecture looked vaguely Grecian. Truss roofs touched the sky; the sky being a low, blue, nebulous thing full of clouds like wadded cotton. Below their feet, the streets were the most even cobblestone Rosalind had ever walked on. Of course, the streets were missing both modes of transportation and people, so it seemed like a bit of a waste.
They walked past a clothing store full of merchandise and a restaurant stocked with unspoiled food. There were a number of research labs full of equipment and the finest technology 1900 had to offer. There were homes that had all the amenities but did not look lived in. There were markets and hair cutteries and churches.
It was the churches Rosalind found most interesting.
“I have found religion, brother,” said Rosalind, observing a fresco heavily featuring a Lutece who looked very much like herself.
Robert sat in a pew and opened a book. “In the beginning, Rosalind created a universe and an aesthetically suspect city no one wanted to live in.”
Rosalind rolled her eyes at him but hesitated before looking back to her fresco. “There… There’s a book?”
“I’m sure it’s no Barriers To Transdimensional Travel, but… apparently.”
Rosalind barely made it to the nearest pew. She dropped onto it, trying very hard to ignore the identical books to either side of her. She needed a moment to process this.
“It’s not a very long book,” said Robert. “As far as religious texts go, it’s sort of pathetic. I’ve been handed pamphlets more substantial than this.”
“People worshiped a Lutece.”
“And that’s something to brag about?” asked Robert, thumbing through their holy text. “People worshiped Comstock.”
“Mm.. Point taken.” Just the same, Rosalind took a book with her when they left. She thumbed through it as they walked, only getting a chance to really sit down and read it when they stopped for a break.
It had become dark. It was unclear how such a thing happened. There was no time to travel through and make it day again. There were no probabilities and paths untaken, only the now.
Rosalind and Robert walked until they found an unoccupied house and stopped to rest. It was, like everything else, unoccupied. They made themselves comfortable in the master bedroom. Rosalind read by the light from the lamp on the bedside table while Robert took a shower in the adjoining bathroom. “This is fascinating,” she said when she heard the water stop running.
“Oh?”
“It’s all very flowery and needlessly poetic, but it seems that Rosalind’s going through first did render her something of a god.”
Robert stepped from the bathroom, still toweling off. Steam rose from his damp shoulders. “And how are we defining god?”
“Well, she made all this and doesn’t seem to have lived amongst them after that. She was unable or unwilling to- You’re dripping on the carpet.”
Robert shrugged and wrapped the towel around his waist. “And the general populace…”
“Worshiped her. At least, some of them did.”
“Anything in there about a Rapture?”
“No, but I wouldn’t mind some rapture.” Rosalind closed the book and set it aside. “I feel like I’ve earned it.”
“I appreciate your coming here with me. I really do.” Robert sounded like he meant that… He also sounded just a touch disappointed, but Rosalind would take what she could get.
“I should hope so.” Rosalind toyed with the sleeve of her slip, rolling a loose thread between her fingers.
Robert went to her.
“Wait!” said Rosalind. “You’re still soaked. I won’t have you getting the bed wet.”
“You must be kidding. We can just go next door after.” But Robert knelt anyway.
“Good boy,” said Rosalind, moving toward him, sitting on the edge of the bed. She draped her legs over his shoulders, crossing her ankles behind his back. “Now worship me.”
They gathered their things and went next door after.
Walking from one house to the next was odd, not because they could, (though, that was also odd.) but because it was necessary. Walking was the only way to get there, and when they arrived, Rosalind collapsed onto the bed with a long sigh. Eyes closed, she felt Robert climb onto the bed as well, felt him press a kiss to her temple before lying down.
Rosalind fell asleep feeling… content.
It was a touch that woke Rosalind. Light and gentle, it traced the curve of her cheek, the shape of her jaw. Rosalind turned her head with an grunt, leaning away from it.
She then realized she could hear Robert lightly snoring and scrambled into a sitting position, fully awake and pressed back to the headboard. “Robert!”
Robert jumped, eyes going wide as he scanned the room for the source of all the sudden excitement. His gaze settled back on Rosalind. The room was dark but, seemingly, empty.
“Something touched my face,” said Rosalind, certain, regardless of a lack of evidence.
“Something?” repeated Robert with a yawn. He propped himself up on his elbows as he watched her.
“Someone,” Rosalind amended. She got out of bed. “Help me search the room.”
The room was not heavily furnished. The search did not take long. “I don’t-”
“-see anything. No.” Rosalind gave the room one last once over. “We’re leaving.”
“What?” asked Robert, watching as Rosalind snatched her stockings up off the seat of a chair. “Now? It’s still dark out.”
“Exactly. I don’t trust it.”
“You don’t trust the dark?”
“No, Robert. I do not trust the dark in a place that has no naturally occurring day and night cycle.”
“That’s a fair point.” Robert made for his own discarded clothing. “Though, I’m not sure it’s worth running away over.”
Staying so long had been a mistake. Taking a post-coital nap had been downright foolish. Eternal life did not breed vigilance. “We’ll check back,” said Rosalind, casting a skeptical look out of a window and up at the night sky. “When visibility is better and we’ve had a chance to really consider-” Rosalind stopped talking. Her jacket dropped from her hands before she could put it on. She had to sit down; right here, right now. Her legs wouldn’t take her as far as the nearest chair. They wouldn’t take her a single step.
Rosalind sat on the floor. Dimly, she saw Robert lower himself back onto the bed. He sat at the edge of the mattress, looking as Rosalind must also look: utterly bewildered.
“I don’t understand,” said Rosalind.
“We’re…” began Robert, but the concept appeared too much for him to process into words just yet. It was too jarring, like a thread had just been cut. Whatever held them to their own universe was gone. Just gone.
Rosalind shook her head and stood. That couldn’t be right. She tried to leave.
Nothing.
Rosalind tried again.
Nothing.
She heard Robert saying something to her but ignored him. Rosalind tried yet again, taking a step forward and willing herself back home.
This time something happened.
It was not what Rosalind had hoped for. It was a hand; the same one that had woken her up, perhaps, but bigger. Its fingers curled around her waist and legs, flinging her forward over impossibly large knuckles as she was lifted up.
A series of frantic attempts to phase back into her own universe followed.
They all failed.
Rosalind was lifted from the bedroom, straight through the roof as if it were a dollhouse. The speed of it all whipped her hair and forced her to squint her eyes. Through her lashes and between sudden jolts, she could see a second hand. She was sure it held Robert.
They rose through the clouds, into the sky, into an abyss of pure white. Here the hands stopped, disembodied but not without an owner. The hands slowed and opened. The palms came together, cupping at eye-level before two blue, globe-like eyes.
Half-clothed, Rosalind and Robert grabbed one another. They sat there and stared. It was not often that they were at a loss for words.
The thing before them was a face without a head. There were the eyes, a pair of pinkish lips, and swirls of orange hair that seemed to float. The hands cradling the Luteces had no arms, no visible wrists; any limbs or borders or shadows this body had were invisible, insubstantial, nonexistent maybe. There was only the white void.
Rosalind could not look away. She kept her gaze fixed on the unblinking blue of one monstrous eye. Meanwhile, she clung to the body intertwined with her own. “Robert,” she managed, once she had found her voice. It was hardly a whisper, but it still felt like shouting. She heard Robert shakily inhale, then swallow.
“Yes?” he said. Rosalind barely heard the reply even though she could feel his breath on her ear.
“I don’t think we-”
“-took your religion literally enough.”
“No. We did not.”
“Well, that’s not our fault.”
“Force of habit, really.”
They went silent again. If the Lutece-god had any feelings about their banter, it didn’t indicate them. It didn’t do much, really. It just stared and continued holding them.
Rosalind had existed for quite some time without feeling much in the way of mortal fear. Now she was reliving more than she cared to of the sensation. Of course, there was only so long one can stay immobilized by such fear.
“Hello?” called Rosalind, shouting up to the thing’s face. It immediately seemed unnecessary. She used her regular speaking voice instead. “You have our attention. What do you want?”
The Lutece-god stared, but its expression grew thoughtful. At least, Rosalind thought it did. It was difficult to tell. There wasn’t much to go on. The Lutece-god’s lips parted. YOU, it said, it’s voice more a booming thought ringing in Rosalind’s head than an actual sound.
“Us?” asked Rosalind.
“You,” said Robert. “It wasn’t looking at me.”
As if to clarify, the Lutece-god lifted Rosalind and Robert and forcibly separated them. Rosalind screamed and heard Robert do the same. There was a ripping that felt like it should have been audible. It wasn’t a simple snap like losing the link to their universe had been. It was the messy removal of something fused to you. It was pulling something gummy out of hair. It was picking gravel out of a skinned knee. It was amputating a limb. It was slow, and the longer it lasted the more unbearable it became. Rosalind felt Robert’s fingers scrabble across her forearm. She reached back for him, nails barley touching the back of his hand.
Slowly, Rosalind became aware that they were apart. The separation felt like it was still happening. The pull that surrounded her, that link to Robert felt raw but undoubtedly broken.
Now that they were separated, the Lutece-god turned its thoughtful expression to Robert. It dropped him.
Rosalind heard a startled, strangled noise that must have come from her as she struggled inside the Lutece-god’s grip.
SHH, breathed the Lutece-god. IT’S ALL RIGHT.
And then it dropped her too.
Rosalind sat up in bed, clutching the sheets to her breast. It was still very dark. At the windows, she could just make out a faint outline of dim light around the drapes. It was morning, maybe.
Yes, morning. And she needed to get up. She had somewhere to be. Her lab. Yes. And her team- Her team? Yes. Her team was waiting. They were… Robert was… No…
Rosalind swung her feet around to the floor. The room spun a bit as she stood. Black splotches expanded and obscured her vision, but she managed to stagger into the bathroom anyway. Blindly, Rosalind switched on the light with one hand, groping for the faucet with the other.
The cold water helped. She let it drip down her face and took a few deep breaths before opening her eyes. There was pink in the basin. Rosalind turned her face up to the mirror and saw that her nose was bleeding. Leaving behind her reflection, she staggered back into the bedroom, out into the hall, and down a flight of stairs.
She more tumbled than staggered down the latter. There was a worrying gap in Rosalind’s memory between teetering on the second step and lying in a heap on the first landing.
This was all wrong. Rosalind wasn’t entirely sure why yet, but she knew. Rising to her feet, she somehow managed to get to the front door, to open it, and to lurch out into the street.
It was early dawn. There was only a boy with an empty wooden crate and a satchel full of newspapers out on the corner, but he seemed alarmed to see a woman in a nightgown all the same. ‘Where’s Robert?’ she meant to ask the boy when he ran closer. “Where am I?” she asked instead. If he had an answer for her, she was not awake to hear it.
Rosalind woke again, in the same bed. She did not sit up this time, but she did glance at the window and notice that there was significantly more light coming through the closed drapes. A woman was even sitting near them, doing needlepoint with practiced, near-mechanical movements.
“Mother?” Rosalind asked, her voice skeptical and a bit hoarse.
The woman at the window looked up then stood, placing her needlepoint in her newly vacated seat. “I was beginning to think you would sleep the day through,” she said, pulling the drapes open to let the sunlight flood in.
Rosalind’s eyes struggled to adjust, but she already knew the woman approaching the bed was indeed her mother: Madeline Lutece. It had been a while. Her face had more lines and the hair was different than she last remembered. It was gray now, not like when Rosalind was a girl. Her mother had had the most angelic blond hair then - a trait Rosalind had not inherited. Superficially, she was very much her father’s daughter. All Rosalind had were her mother’s eyes, something Madeline had always been quick to inform strangers of, interrupting them when they bent down to compliment Rosalind’s striking orange locks… God, her head was killing her.
“The doctor called me,” said Madeline, perching herself daintily on the edge of the bed.
Rosalind began to sit up. “What-”
Madeline pushed her daughter back down. “There’s a nasty flu going around. The doctor’s sure that’s it.”
Rosalind raised a hand to her nose. “But-”
“You had quite a fall,” said Madeline. “The symptoms can make you quite lightheaded. Lily - You know my friend Lily, don’t you dear? - Lily collapsed in the park just last Tuesday. She’s made a full recovery, save for a few bruises. I expect they’re mostly to her ego.”
Rosalind tried to get her thoughts together. Everything was terribly muddled, but there were several things she felt, instinctively, that she needed to work out. Most importantly, “Where’s Robert?”
“Who?” asked Madeline. “Is he someone you work with, dear?”
“No… Wait, yes. I think so.”
A look of concern flitted across Madeline’s face, but it passed. “Then I’m afraid I wouldn’t know.” She reached down to brush a strand of hair from Rosalind’s damp forehead. “Of course, this wouldn’t be a problem if you took the time to introduce me to your coworkers.”
Rosalind wasn’t sure of much right now, but she was certain of one thing. “You are not my mother. Who are you?”
The woman pretending to be Madeline forced a laugh. “What are you talking about?”
Rosalind’s mother was a horrid, insufferably pleasant woman - and while the person before her had most of the impersonation down, there was one glaring oversight that was impossible to ignore. “Father worked. Robert worked. I had hobbies.”
One of Madeline’s graceful hands flew to her chest. She looked affronted… then thoughtful… then resigned. “I suppose I won’t insult you by keeping up the charade.”
“Who are you?” Rosalind asked again, sitting up and pressing her back to the headboard.
“My name is your name,” said the woman, changing from Madeline into someone new. Her clothing and posture remained the same, but her features shifted and her hair darkened to a familiar orange. “But I suppose you could call me something else. Ros? No, father called us Ros. I believe we hated that. Rose, then? Is that all right?”
The familiar face did nothing to assuage Rosalind’s suspicion. “Call yourself whatever you like,” she said. “Are you the-” She traced wide shapes in the air just over her head, looking for the right scientific jargon. “-the… big me?”
Rose watched Rosalind with eyes that weren’t quite emotionless but were somehow lacking, uncomprehending. “In a sense,” she said. “I’m only a piece of what you encountered before.”
“And so you decided to take the form of my mother,” Rosalind said, flatly. “You’ll have to forgive me if I question the foresight of that particular decision.”
Rose did not look offended. “I acted almost exactly as your mother would. She will exist shortly and will have always existed in this world.”
“In this… world?”
“Yes, I made a world for you.”
“Why?”
“Because I like you.”
“What? Like a… Like a pet? You like me like a pet, so you’ve made me a little terrarium.” Rosalind had moved out of bed and across the room almost without realizing it. She wanted to get some distance between herself and Rose.
“Not a terrarium.” Rose remained seated on the bed, perfectly tranquil. “I made you a world. I placed you in emptiness and had a world spring up around you. I think you will agree that that is quite a bit more substantial than a simple terrarium.”
Rosalind paused near the doorway. She thought back on her life- on her live(s). (God, her head.) Rose was right. “I don’t want this.”
“Why not?”
Where to start? “None of it’s real!”
“It’s all very real.” Rose sat up a little straighter, this time looking almost offended by Rosalind’s words. “I assure you this world is populated by thinking, breathing, living people: individuals. It is fleshing out as we speak. Your mother was a brief exception. I had no way of explaining your current state without giving her considerable reason for alarm. I wished to spare you both that unpleasantness… I also had to interfere a bit with a newsboy… and a doctor… and few of the people who work for you. But, again, those were brief exceptions; a couple of transitional transgressions, if you will.”
Rosalind sat on the floor.
“I realize this is a lot to accept.”
It was entirely impossible to accept. Rosalind wasn’t sure what to attempt to accept first. “Where’s Robert?”
“In a preexisting world. I made a place for him.”
“What? He doesn’t get his own world, too?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s not like me.” Rose stood and made as if she intended to go to Rosalind. Rosalind must have looked less than thrilled by the gesture, because Rose sat right back down with a small, frustrated sigh. “I’ve been here… I can’t explain it in words, exactly… Always. I’ve been here always. I was the first among many to come here. They still exist. The world you arrived in by coming through the arch was the first of many I made for them. I’ve relocated them. They still exist, but… they are not like me.”
“I’m not like you.”
“But you are!” Rose urged. “You wouldn’t believe all the people I’ve created in my own image.”
“Maybe you just need more practice,” said Rosalind.
Rose ignored the suggestion. “I haven’t met anyone like me. Not until now… You know what it’s like to be lonely.”
“Not for a long, long time.” Rosalind could still feel the ragged edges where Robert had been ripped away. It had been a long time since she felt loneliness, but already she was starting to remember. “Put us back together. Put us back.”
“No,” said Rose.
A cold dread blossomed in Rosalind’s chest. “Then bring him here.”
“No,” said Rose.
“But I don’t like it here.”
“Well, that’s not fair. You haven’t given it a chance.”
Rosalind crossed her arms over her chest and lifted her chin, trying to look sure and self-important from her rather lowly position, seated on the floor. “I’m not going to.”
“I made a world for you, and you won’t even look at it.”
“No.”
“It has its own geography and its own history. The science is even a bit different. Give it a week, at least. I’m sure you’ll find it very interesting.”
“I’m sure I would.”
“Then you’ll try it?”
“No.”
“Think about it, then. Remember the life you’ve led here.”
“No, thank you. It gives me a headache.”
Rose slammed her hands on the corners of the mattress and regarded Rosalind with oddly empty but, undeniably, disappointed eyes. “You and… Robert cannot exist in the same world. Not naturally.”
“Then restore us and let us return to our own. We were quite happy there, thank you.”
“Were you?” asked Rose. It was a rhetorical question, one with a nasty edge of sarcasm to it Rosalind did not at all appreciate. “No matter,” Rose continued with a sigh, breathing out her frustration and carrying on with considerably more levity, “We’ll start again. Something more familiar this time and less idyllic.”
Before Rosalind could insist she and Robert be released, the ceiling flew away. The roof came with it, the whole of the bedroom suddenly exposed to a blue sky; the view was marred slightly by a massive face and two large pale hands. One of them snatched Rosalind up and repeated a process she could only pray she wouldn’t be forced to become too familiar with.
Rosalind sat up in bed… Or tried to. Her head colliding with something solid put a stop to that. Rosalind crashed back down to her pillow, groaning and clutching her temple. When the aching abated, she opened her eyes.
Bunk beds. Narrow, sagging, three-bunk-high bunk beds. The room was dim but not dark. Through small, rectangular windows near the ceiling, Rosalind could see that it was, perhaps, midday. Despite an abundance of uncomfortable bedding and most of it looking quite lived in, she was the only one who had been asleep.
She was on the lowest bunk, on a set of beds in the corner furthest from the door. Pinching her nose, she rolled over and onto her feet. Comparatively speaking, she felt a bit better this time around. Of course, she was still in no mood to simply give up and settle into a new home. A terrarium, a very nice, very elaborate one, but a habitat for much loved pets all the same.
Rosalind left the dormitory in her night gown. Her feet were bare, and the tile floor was cold. The walls were white and clinical, and down the hallway she could already hear the pleasant, electric hum of machinery. There was little separation between living quarters and work space. A little impersonal, yes, but not a wholly unhappy arrangement.
At the end of the hallway, there was a room lined with blinking consoles. Three people were there. Two men and a woman, seated in chairs and crowded around a monitor, taking notes. One of the men looked up when Rosalind was nearly across the room and through the next set of doors. “Are you feeling better, Rosali…” The man’s eyes widened, seeing Rosalind in her nightgown.
What was his name? Eliot. And the other two were- No, Rosalind pushed that to the back of her mind. She wasn’t staying. Thinking too hard about her life here could only complicate and confuse matters.
Eliot stood, prompting the other two to look back as well. Eliot shifted the record book and pencil he was holding into his left hand. “Is everything okay?” He made a general sort of motion toward his own nose. “Your, um… Your nose is bleeding.”
“I’ll be fine,” said Rosalind. “I’m feeling much better, to be honest. Given my past experiences, I imagine I’m better equipped than most when it comes to mentally compartmentalizing all this.”
“Oh.” Eliot did not appear all that convinced of Rosalind’s good health. He did did not appear all that concerned either. “Be that as it may, you should probably get dressed and… see to your nose. After that, though, I would very much appreciate your looking over some of these calculations I made yesterday.” He indicated his records book. Rosalind slapped it out of his hand.
Eliot stared at Rosalind, as did the rest of the room. Rosalind was somewhat puzzled herself. “I’m sorry, that was uncalled for.” She took a step toward the door but stopped and turned back to Eliot. “Unless it wasn’t. I don’t think I liked you much… So take it as personally as you like. Use your own digression.”
Rosalind continued through the door and down another hallway. She passed many people on her way. Some of them inquired as to whether or not she was all right, but most of them either stared or pointedly ignored her. There seemed to be no protocol for dealing with this sort of thing.
The building was a large one, but Rosalind felt she knew where the exit was. She held no specific route in her mind, but the exit was what she was headed for; she stopped only once more, when two people caught her eye.
The Rosalind Straussler that Rosalind Lutece was most familiar with had been thirty-one when approached by Simon Young - a war veteran and proponent of nationalism. He had a vision, and Rosalind’s research could help him realize it. She did not share this vision. She thought Young to be a thoroughly unlikable but undeniably charismatic xenophobe.
But Rosalind wanted to work. She was tired of being laughed at or, worse, ignored. For a few years, she had even tried things her mother’s way. She settled down, squeezed all her experiments and research into a spare room and a couple of hours a day.
She was still Rosalind McDonagh when she dropped everything. A night of shouting and tears, and she still couldn’t keep the smile from her face the next morning, when the men came to clear out the spare room. They packed her life’s work into crates and carted it off carefully, reverently to a dock, where Rosalind boarded a ship that took her far away.
In a parallel reality, a man named Wendel Straussler took a similar deal. He wasn’t ignored - only laughed at, quietly and out of earshot. His colleagues kept in touch, but only so they could invite him out, introducing him to others as a sort of novelty. At thirty-one, he was a bachelor surpassed professionally by every last one of his peers, spending more time caring for his ailing parents than pursuing his own research. The day his life was packed up in crates was the day the nurse moved in and he moved out - to help build a new world, to the facility far away, beneath the ice.
Separately, they oversaw the building of a means to supply Young with his dream. Where Robert and Rosalind transposed the self, Wendel and Rosalind transposed the mind. Young laid out the plans for a world of unlimited potential, where imagination was the limit. (So long as rules were followed, and the masses stayed where they belonged.) Thousands joined him there, in that city the size and scope of a small planet.
Rosalind and Wendel stayed awake while the others slept. With scientists and technicians, they monitored going ons in the city from the outside and entered it when necessary. When things began to fall apart, they were in a position to leave first.
Rosalind ran, Wendel stayed.
Rosalind hid, Wendel survived long enough to help Simon Young’s son enter the city.
Ten years after the fall, Rosalind was living in a tiny apartment, under an assumed name. Wendel was long dead, having barricaded himself in the supply closet with a loaded gun and sufficient motivation for self-termination. The denizens of the city who had not been evacuated in time had started waking on their own. They were hostile and much changed.
Rosalind Lutece was standing with Robert when Rosalind née Straussler came back to the docks to meet with the person seeking her out. They had information she needed to know, they said. They knew what happened to her work. Unlike Wendel’s death, whether or not Simon Young’s son murdered her was a variable.
The lighthouse was not a comfortable place to be in the dark and the rain. Rosalind Lutece would huddle next to her brother while she watched a different Rosalind die. While her last moments could not be called peaceful, they were not traumatic. A sad sort of acceptance would seem to wash over her as she lay there. She would reach into her pocket and find the picture of herself with the man she divorced. It was something she always kept close. Rosalind Lutece did not think it was because she loved or even missed the man. She suspected it was to try and fill a longing to belong - to a family unit or group of friends, someone who would miss you if you were gone and happily claim you as one of their own. There was, undoubtedly, a loneliness in the woman, one that she could never quite quench or place.
Here and now, in a different universe, Rosalind Lutece recognized both of these people: Wendel and Rosalind Straussler. They were working on opposite ends of the same room; one surveying the holographic scale image of a city, the other jotting something on a chalkboard.
They (and others) had forced Rosalind to question many things in the past. Questions about consciousness, about individuality, genetic memory, metaphysics. The answers she found to these questions were few and far between. She knew that her mother liked the name Rosalind and, in the absence of a girl to christen such, wasn’t too picky about what to name boys. She knew, regardless of whether or not it was fair to call them alternate versions of herself, that she saw a lot of herself in these two.
Rosalind Lutece had always pitied those who both were and were not herself. All those hours spent dreaming of a mirror image of themselves as a friend, as a lover. Most of them would never know what a weight could be lifted when they actually met that reflection.
At least, Rosalind Lutece had pitied them until now. Standing there in her nightgown, watching Rosalind and Wendel go about their work, she was getting a different impression.
The clicking of writing at the chalkboard ceased. Wendel took a step back, spinning the chalk in his fingers, frowning at his equations. Rosalind Straussler looked up from the holographic city to glance in his direction. She gave Wendel’s back the sort of look Rosalind Lutece had seen Robert give Jeremiah Fink.
“You can’t be serious,” Rosalind Lutece said flatly and to herself. “Why in the world would you hate each other?”
The Strausslers and everyone working in the room besides turned to look at Rosalind. Most of them did a double-take. She continued on toward the exit before they could inquire after her wellbeing.
Standing in the vestibule between the lobby and outside, Robert was waiting.
Rosalind felt her pulse quicken when she saw him and picked up her pace to match it, slowing only when Robert’s eyes met hers. She continued toward him, but slower, more uncertain. Once inside the vestibule, she kept a skeptical distance. “What?” she asked, realizing she had grown reliant on that pull she felt between them. Without it, telling him apart from one of Rose’s imitations was tricky. She didn’t want to admit that she wasn’t sure whether or not the person standing across from her was Robert, not aloud.
Robert looked Rosalind up and down then removed his jacket. “Let’s go somewhere private to talk, shall we?” he suggested, attempting to drape his coat over her shoulders.
“There’s no need for that,” Rosalind said, rolling her eyes but accepting the coat anyway. “I don’t care what these people think of me. It’s not as if I’m staying.”
“That’s what we need to talk about.” Robert grabbed Rosalind by the arm and guided her outside rather forcibly.
Rosalind stumbled out into the light and down the building’s front steps. There was a wide stone path extending through the front lawn and through a large gate. Rosalind could see that they were on a mountain and that down below there was a city. That didn’t seem to be the direction in which Robert was steering her. He made it as far as the fountain before taking a sharp right between the hedges. Off the main path and on the grounds, there was what appeared to be a small shed. They ducked in there.
The shed was full of gardening supplies, mostly. The wooden floor was covered with dirt and dust. Rosalind could feel the grit of it beneath her feet. “Well?” she prompted, leaning back against a counter laden with rusted tools.
“You do know these are real worlds, don’t you. This isn’t a dream.” Robert didn’t phrase his words like a question. They sounded quite angry, though: something Rosalind wouldn't expect at a time like this.
She didn’t think this was her Robert. Given the way he was acting and what Rose had said earlier about the impossibility of them sharing a world together - it seemed unlikely… But there was still that shred of doubt.
“This isn’t a place we can just leave voluntarily. We’re bound by the laws of time here, you know.” Robert took a step closer, crowding Rosalind against the counter.
“I know,” said Rosalind, planting a hand in the center of his chest and nudging him back a step. “But I’m not willing to just settle in like I don’t mind.” Rosalind couldn’t help but chuckle at the absurdity of such an idea.
“She made worlds. Two realities for you.”
“I fail to see how that is my problem. I didn’t ask for them.”
“I did,” said Robert, stepping forward again.
“What?”
“An eternity with you. Time unending outside of time. Who would want that?”
“You’re not Robert,” Rosalind said, removing her hand from his chest and stepping around him.
“You say you’re content, but for how long? This is for the best, Rosalind. People weren’t meant to live like we do.”
“Yes, well, people weren’t meant to mutate into jealous gods, but I can see that hasn’t stopped you.” Rosalind looked back, her hand on the door handle.
“I’m miserable in our universe. Are you so selfish that doesn’t matter to you?”
“If you want me to argue with Robert, please take me to him. In the meantime…” Rosalind opened the door to the shed, intending to leave. She would have, had Robert not pushed it closed. “You aren’t Robert,” she reminded him, and herself.
“I’m what he thinks,” said Robert. Rosalind could feel his body just behind hers, could feel the hand not holding the door move to her hip. “I know his mind and the anger and frustration there. I know him better than you, maybe better than he knows himself.”
Rosalind found her mouth unusually dry. “Oh?” she managed, lamely, still facing the door.
“He thinks you’re selfish.”
“Yes, you’ve mentioned that one. What else do you suppose he thinks?”
“He thinks you’re cold.”
“Does he now?”
“He thinks you’re oddly delusional for such a pessimist.”
“Oh, now you really must elaborate on that one.”
Robert paused. The hand on the door relaxed somewhat. “You think you’re the same.” The hand on Rosalind’s hip slid down her thigh and inward. “But you’re not.”
Rosalind gasped. She looked to the right, out the dirty windows where the occasional passerby could be glimpsed on the path across the lawn. “There are differences,” she conceded. “I never suggested there weren’t.”
“But you do,” urged Robert. “You think you’re the same person.”
“We are, essentially.”
“You’re not,” said Robert, his hand on one of their more noticeable differences. Rosalind could feel his fingers between her legs, rubbing her through her nightgown. “You’re not the same person at all.”
Rosalind squirmed back again Robert, eyes still on the window. “What would you know?”
“Plenty!” said Robert, the way he pulled her back against him as emphatic as his tone. “I know how angry you make him, how frustrated. I know all the things he wants to do to you.”
Rosalind tried to control her breathing. “And what… What would those be?”
“Oh, Rosalind,” said Robert, removing his hand from the door to fondle her right breast. “Where should I start?”
What are you doing? Rosalind asked herself as her feet left the floor and her spine pressed painfully against the door.
This isn’t the time for this, Rosalind told herself as she wrapped her legs around him, implying that there was some correct time to fornicate with gods doing poor imitations of your brother.
Stop, no, wait. A dozen objections died on Rosalind’s lips.
The jacket on her shoulders dropped to the ground as she was moved to the counter. The tools were uncomfortable beneath her but she ignored them, channeling her focus, instead, to the removal of clothing. Robert had already pushed her nightgown up, exposing the tops of her thighs and - she was sure - more, besides.
No, the clothing her hands worked at now was Robert’s. And maybe clothing wasn’t specific enough a word. Taking his vest off wasn’t enough. Yanking his shirt off so that threads snapped and buttons scattered wasn’t enough. When Robert buried his face in her neck and hair and entered her, Rosalind’s fingers were still scrabbling at his chest. Between gasps and pained grunts, she clawed at it, at his disguise. If she could just get it off… She knew it wasn’t Robert… but there was still that doubt, and the shadow it cast was so confusing and unbearably long.
Rosalind couldn’t have said when the change happened. She was only alerted to it when Robert knelt. She looked down and found that it was Rose looking up at Rosalind from between her legs.
“We are the same,” said Rose, inclining her head so that her cheek brushed tenderly against Rosalind’s inner thigh. “There is more me in you than Robert. You know that. Just say it.”
Rosalind leaned back, angry with herself for her own frustration. She turned her attention to the dirty window, where movement caught her eye. That might be the Strausslers passing the fountain, satchels slung over their shoulders, separated by several colleagues. “You lied to me,” said Rosalind.
“Hmm?”
“Why do they get to be together?”
“Who?”
Rosalind looked down at Rose again. She was beginning to notice how drafty it was in there and just how uncomfortable the counter was. “Far be it from me to tell you how to do your job, but are you not omnipotent?”
“Well, well my lovely physicist. Aren’t you the theologian?” Rose shook her head. “This isn’t me. This body is just a facet of myself. You’ve been where I live.”
Any interest Rosalind had in finishing whatever it was that had been started here was gone. She lifted herself further up onto the counter, pulling her nightgown down and shoving the tools aside. “I saw nothing there, just you.”
“Precisely,” said Rose, standing. Her disheveled clothes were still Robert’s. “I can’t come near the realities I create. They would unravel.”
Rosalind gave a huge sigh and looked back out the window, feigning disinterest. “How sad.”
“It is,” said Rose. “It’s lonely.”
“So you’ve said… Regardless, you were sloppy when you made this world.”
“I drew it from your mind.”
“And I have a tendency to let realities run together in my head. I’ve just seen so many of them. I can’t help it. I’m only human.”
“Hardly.”
“I’m certainly not a god.”
“Semantics.”
“The point is, your holiness-”
“Just Rose will do.”
“The point is, Rose… You were sloppy.”
Rose bristled a bit at what she was insinuating, but only a bit. While beyond simple concepts like embarrassment, she still seemed to want to impress Rosalind. “I had short notice.”
“Do I look like someone interested in excuses? Sloppy work is sloppy work.” Rosalind slid forward and dropped from the counter. “Take me to Robert. I won’t be happy anywhere until I speak with him. If we really were the same, you would have realized that by now.”
Rose’s expression was difficult to read. She watched Rosalind with empty eyes. “It seems there are things I’ve forgotten,” she said at last. “But I’m sure you’ll remind me.” She sighed. “Fine. I suppose I must have anticipated as much. Placing you in the world I left Robert in shouldn’t really upset things… But, I warn you, it is not a world I’m proud of.”
“Oh?”
“It was one of my earliest works. I went through a phase, you see.”
“No, I don’t,” said Rosalind. “But I’m sure I’m looking forward to it. Take me to Robert.”
Rose frowned. The ceiling flew off the shack, and the sky above opened up…
Rosalind woke up in damp darkness. At first, she was unable to move. It felt like her body was encased in gel. But then the gel broke down, became a liquid through which she could swim. Rosalind noticed a light and moved toward it.
Between Rosalind and the light there was a film. Through it, she could see movement and hear muffled voices. She pushed on it and the film deformed, stretching with her fingers and then her arm. She tried a leg next, and her foot found solid ground. She pulled her other leg in and suddenly she was dropping to a floor of metal grating.
Rosalind flailed. The film encased her body almost entirely. She tore at it, yanking it first from her face, sucking in a breath of air she hadn’t realized she had desperately needed before she had taken it.
“That’s two this month,” said a familiar voice. “Odd.”
Rosalind tried to find who had spoken, but her vision was too blurry. She tugged the film from her ears instead. Immediately, she heard more voices beneath the whir of machinery. She was in a large crowded room and was, she realized as her hands pulled film from her shoulders, completely naked.
Rosalind saw the rough shape of someone approaching. “Welcome, Lutece,” said a woman’s voice not unlike Rosalind’s. “Remain where you are. Just breathe.”
Rosalind had many questions she wanted to ask. There were several dozen of them vying to be asked first. Chief among them centered around the troubling suspicion that she had just been born. The scientist in her wanted to demand an explanation for the pseudo-scientific aberration that birthed her. Everything else in Rosalind was rather traumatized by the experience and very much wanted to be thinking about nothing at all; questions could wait.
“Hold still for me, please,” said the voice not unlike Rosalind’s before granting her wish.
Rosalind felt the syringe enter her neck. A moment later, she didn’t feel anything.
Rose was right to be ashamed of this world.
Rosalind was not sure what inspired one to create a world full of oneself. Narcissism or loneliness, she supposed. Likely both in the case of Rose.
Rosalind came to in a very nice room, on a very nice curtained bed with a canopy. An elderly woman bearing a striking resemblance to her welcomed her again to the world and handed her a packet of introductory reading material before launching into a spiel that made Rosalind feel like she should have been born knowing more than she did. The information was in there somewhere, surely, but so were all the other lifetimes she’d lived without properly living.
“You shall be formally announced to everyone tomorrow and will, of course, need to pick a name before then. Have you given any thought to that?” The elderly woman motioned someone over.
Robert stepped out from behind the canopy, holding an open book and a pen.
It took Rosalind a moment to find her voice. “Robert?”
The elderly woman and Robert glanced at each other. Robert looked back to Rosalind. “You want your name to be Robert?” asked Robert.
“What?” Rosalind’s thinking was still a bit sluggish and murky. She sat up in bed. “I was asking if you were Robert.”
“Me?” asked the man who, Rosalind could surmise, clearly was not Robert. “No, my name is Wendel.”
“Hmm,” said Rosalind. “Really?”
“Yes. Why?”
“No reason,” said Rosalind, pushing back the covers to find she was in a nightgown yet again. (She supposed it was preferable to being naked.) “Not a name I would pick, is all.”
Wendel frowned. “What name would you pi-”
“Rosalind,” said Rosalind. “I am Rosalind Lutece.”
Wendel made a note in his book. “A common choice,” he commented, shooting Rosalind a decidedly unimpressed look.
The elderly woman, meanwhile, was regarding Rosalind with interest. “There is a Robert Lutece,” she said, pausing when Rosalind straightened where she sat.
Rosalind recognized the look she was getting. She reigned in her excitement. “Really?” she asked, allowing for only the barest bit of interest to be apparent in her voice, pretending as if this was only some vaguely entertaining bit of trivia.
“Yes,” said the woman, glancing in the direction of the door. “Born just two weeks and three days before you, in fact.”
“Huh.” Rosalind would not risk raising suspicions. Not when she was so close. Not when there was a very real possibility of of being locked in a room with assorted Luteces until they figured all this out.
“It’s late,” said the elderly woman, rising. “I’m sure you are looking forward to beginning life, but do try to get some sleep. Someone will be by in the morning.”
Rosalind nodded, absently, pretending to peruse the packet she had been given as Wendel and the old woman left. As soon as she heard the door close she was on her feet, packet flung to the floor.
Rosalind hurried across the room. She stopped at the closed door and listened, waiting what felt like an adequate amount of time before easing the door open.
She walked into the middle of the empty hallway. She stopped. She thought.
They kept them here - for a year or more - like children living with their parents until they acclimated to the real world. That meant Robert couldn’t be far. The door across from hers. That was the right one. She wasn’t sure how she knew, but she did. Rosalind opened it.
And there he was. Rosalind couldn’t imagine how she’d had her doubts when faced with impostors before now.
He was asleep at a desk, slumped over in his shirtsleeves. Rosalind walked to him slowly, trying to assuage the incessant doubts still lingering. The desk was cluttered with open books and pages upon pages of hastily scrawled notes. With just a glance, Rosalind could pick her own name spelled out there more than once.
“Robert,” she said on a simultaneous breath of relief. She touched his arm. “My Robert.”
Robert jumped. He raised his head, looking at Rosalind a moment before comprehending her.
Two weeks and three days, Rosalind recalled. It did not appear as if he had shaved, eaten, or slept much in all that time. He’d looked the same to her for so long, it was a bit disarming to see him any different. Robert’s shock wore off before hers did. He grabbed the hand on his arm and pulled her down into the chair with him, arms wrapping around her fast and tight. Once in his lap, Rosalind did the same.
Even with Robert in her arms, Rosalind’s need for him did not feel sated. She wanted to be closer, and that was impossible. Only now that she had him here did the full scope of what Rose had done to them hit her.
For a long time, they sat like that. Finally, Rosalind turned away to look at the desk, one arm still around his neck. “We should not have come here,” she said. “I won’t say anything so petty as, ‘I told you so,’ but I could.”
“I believe you just did.”
“In so many words.”
“In those exact words.” Robert smiled. “I missed you.”
That was an understatement. Rosalind would have said the same, but supposed she had said what she felt already; in so many words. “What’s all this?” she asked instead, indicating the desk.
“Hmm… oh.” Robert maneuvered Rosalind to one side of his lap and leaned forward a bit. “This and that. I was attempting to figure this place out and find you, but it seems you beat me to that.”
“While I am loathe to downplay my own genius, I’m afraid I did have some help in getting here.”
So Rosalind relayed to Robert her story. She spared him no details, though she did gloss over the part in the supply shed. She attempted to, anyway.
“Was then really the time for that sort of thing?” asked Robert.
Rosalind looked away from Robert and back down at the notes and books on the desk - not that she was actually reading any of them at the moment. “No. It wasn’t. Which is probably why we didn’t finish.”
“Why would you even start?”
“I don’t know. I was caught up in the moment…” Rosalind’s mind wandered a little. She looked back to Robert. “Maybe we should try it.”
“Sex in an old shed?”
“What? No. Sex where you pin me to the wall and I say, ‘no’ and ‘stop’ and seem very flustered.”
“Now?”
“No.”
“So… now?”
“No!” Rosalind got to her feet. “Not now.”
“So you’ll tell me when.”
“That would spoil it.”
“I’m not sure I feel comfortable with this.”
“Then we’ll lay down some ground rules.”
“Later?”
“Yes, later.”
“Hmm.” Robert stood as well. He walked to the window. There was a large one beside his bed. It looked out over many rooftops and observatory towers and even several smokestacks spilling dense clouds of gray up into the night. It all appeared to slant downward, like all of this had been built on a hill - at the foot of which, there was a wall. Beyond that, there were few lights; fewer and fewer still, the farther things got from the wall itself. In the distance, Rosalind could see a smudge of orange on the horizon. “The sun’s coming up. You should go back to your room soon,” said Robert.
Rosalind walked to the window and stood beside him. “Maybe,” she said. Now that she had found Robert, Rosalind wasn’t all that worried about keeping up appearances. Returning to her room must not have been terribly urgent anyway; Robert didn’t press the matter.
“So she drew on your memories to create the worlds you were in before this one?” asked Robert, though Rosalind had already explained all she knew at length.
“At least one of them, yes,” Rosalind said with a sigh.
“But this world was made before we arrived.”
“I’m not entirely certain how time works here, but her language seemed to insinuate that we were not a factor in its creation, if that’s what you mean.”
“It is.” Robert lifted Rosalind’s hair away from her neck. Rosalind could feel him twisting it around into a rough approximation of how she normally wore it. “I thought I was being mocked when I first arrived here. I swear, you could have pulled this place right out of my daydreams as a boy.”
“Really?” asked Rosalind with genuine interest. Hearing a story about his past that she had neither seen nor heard was a very rare occurrence indeed.
“Really.” Robert let her hair fall. He brushed his fingers through it, separating it into sections with a practiced ease before pulling it up again. “The gist of it. A place where I lived with people like me. All the unintelligent people lived outside, with the animals.”
“How… nice.”
“I was young! Very young. You can’t tell me you didn’t have similar fantasies about the children who bullied you in school.”
“I still have them.”
“Right, well, they wouldn’t be a good basis on which to create a world.”
“Hmm.”
“What happened to the others do you think?”
“Hmm?”
“The other worlds. The two you rejected before coming here.”
Rosalind shrugged.
“Do you think they still exist without you?” asked Robert.
Rosalind began to shrug again, but stopped. “I don’t know,” she admitted. She remembered the sky opening up and Rose’s hands coming down, though.‘I can’t come near the realities I create. They would unravel.’ “Do you think I’m a selfish person?”
Robert had stopped toying with her hair. He leaned around her, placing one hand against the windowsill as he watched the sun crest over distant mountains. “Do you?”
“In ways the word was never intended.” Rosalind looked at her brother. “But I asked what you thought.”
Robert looked over to his sister. “I think we both have poor priorities.”
Rosalind returned to her room before the sky had completely lightened but did not make the trip without Robert.
“What now?” he asked from beneath her silk bedsheets.
“Now,” said Rosalind, turning her head on her pillow. “We figure out how to leave.”
Robert did not want to leave. That much was becoming distressingly clear.
He never came right out and said it. No, Robert avoided the subject instead. He dodged Rosalind’s planning. He made friends. He got a job.
That last one was most telling. He taught at a school outside the walls. Rosalind had never been outside the walls herself and had no interest in ever doing so. She knew that some of the Luteces traveled and that there was a school just outside the walls that many of them taught at. Robert assisted some professor there.
Rosalind saw him with her once, when she went to the gates to intercept him on his way home. She was juggling apples and laughing at something Robert had said. She had orange hair tied into a braid that ran down her back, just past her shoulders. She wore a suit, but casually, with her jacket unbuttoned and trousers tucked into brown leather boots. She had a crooked smile and a nice, earnest laugh.
She was both Rosalind and not. Mostly not. It was an intensely uncomfortable thing to watch.
Rosalind had expressed her concerns to Robert, but there was only so much one can say - beginning and ending with, “Are you going to help me or not?”
And Robert did help, at first. After a month or two, however, his help had mostly tapered off. There was no official discussion on the matter, but if Rosalind never found a way out of this place, there would not need to be one.
Robert moved out of the room across from Rosalind, into a small flat. He begged Rosalind to come too, but she refused.
“I have something I’m working on, Robert. I won’t move it.”
“Do you need my help?”
“I doubt it. I’m fine on my own.”
When Rose finally visited her, Rosalind was still at work on her newest plan of escape. She opened the door, still toweling the grease from her hands. She’d expected to find Robert, but it was a different Lutece.
“You could learn to like it here,” said Rose. Rosalind assumed it was Rose, anyway. She didn’t receive many visitors. It felt like a safe guess.
“No,” said Rosalind. “I could not.”
“Robert likes it here.”
“I was under the impression that you only cared about my happiness.”
“I care about everyone’s happiness, after a fashion. Don’t you care about Robert’s?”
“If I’m not happy here, he won’t be either. Not for long.”
“That sounds a bit like a threat.”
“It did,” conceded Rosalind. “It wasn’t intended as one. It’s just a fact.”
“May I come in?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’m working on something I would sooner keep private. Also, I dislike you.”
“I don’t see why you should dislike me. We’re-”
“The same,” sighed Rosalind. “Yes, yes. You keep saying that. Coming here, I think I finally know why.”
Rose raised her eyebrows marginally. “Oh?”
“No one in this world - or even the last two, come to think of it. No one in any of these worlds had the life, I expect, we both did growing up. None of them faced the same obstacles. Society was conducive to their goals and rewarded them for their achievements. Their work was recognized and appreciated. Their parents were proud.”
Rose’s expression went distant, and her eyes became somewhat dull. For a moment, it looked like she had retreated from her own body - something she, perhaps, could have done. “You’re right,” she said, her tone carrying the certainty of someone who had just checked on the credibility of a fact, personally.
“You could always recreate Earth exactly, make a Rosalind from the same conditions.”
Rose did not pause to even consider Rosalind’s suggestion. She shook her head as if it was something she had already thought over at length and rejected. “I can’t.”
“Well you can’t have me either, so if you would kindly return Robert and myself to our own universe…”
“No.”
Rosalind started to slam the door shut.
“Wait,” said Rose.
Rosalind waited.
“What is it you’re working on in there?” she asked, rising to her toes to try and see past Rosalind.
Rosalind slammed the door.
“What is it you’re working on in there?” asked Robert. He’d asked before, but Rosalind had always shrugged her shoulders or said something equally flippant before changing the subject. She would have told him if he had pressed the matter, but he hadn’t yet.
Rosalind shrugged. “How was work?”
“Fine… Really, though. What are you doing?” Robert put his hands on Rosalind’s shoulders, maneuvering her out of the way so that he could enter her room.
“All right, all right” she surrendered, trying to sound put out even though she knew very well she was smiling. “It’s almost finished. You can help if you like.”
“What is it?” Robert asked, pulling back the sheet Rosalind had re-purposed as a curtain to hide her project from prying eyes. Seeing what she had built, he stared for a bit then asked again, more slowly this time, “What is it?”
“Well,” began Rosalind, opening the panel on the device’s power source. “It is a machine not dissimilar to one we once built together… Hold that end and help me calibrate this, will you? …With the technology of this city at my disposal, I was able to make it quite lightweight.”
Robert helped her, no doubt, recognizing the function of the machine now that his hands were inside it. “Why is it shaped like this?”
“I optimized its shape for discharging projectiles- Oh, very nice. I always find that part a bit tricky. Thank you.”
Robert stepped away, letting Rosalind take back over. “It’s a gun. You made a gun.”
“You make it sound so inelegant when you just blurt it out like that,” said Rosalind, closing back the panel. “But yes. I suppose I did.”
“What on Earth for?”
“Precisely because we are not on Earth, dear brother.” Rosalind lifted the power source by its straps and shrugged it onto her back. “More specifically, I intend to use it on Rose.”
“You built a gun to shoot God.”
“That really sounds very silly… but, again, technically correct. I’ve made this to shoot a god.” Rosalind lifted the gun into her arms, raising it in order to look down its sights - of which, it had none. Rosalind was not particularly adept in the construction of weaponry. “And before you say something cheeky, no, it is not because I’m a scientist. I just don’t like her.”
"How does that get us home?”
“First I need to test it.” Rosalind leveled the gun at her own bed. Robert scrambled out of the way, moving to stand well behind her. “If I’m being honest, I may have been waiting for your help. Ideally, I’d like to have a longer trial period. Ideally, you would have been helping me from the beginning.” She spun a dial on the front of the gun and pressed down on a button. The power source roared to life, warming her back. “I think that’s done it, though.” She squeezed the trigger.
The recoil was considerable. Rosalind stumbled backward as crackling bolas of energy ripped from the gun and spun forward. They collided with the bed, expanding around it. Around the edges of the tear, Rosalind briefly glimpsed a void of white. After that, the whole thing was gone.
“Congratulations,” said Robert, flatly, looking down at the light rectangle of carpet where the bed had been. “You are now without a bed. That means…”
“That means we can go home,” said Rosalind, suddenly somewhat breathless at the idea.
“You still haven’t explained to me how.”
Rosalind rounded on her brother. “And why should I?” she demanded. Whatever inner-floodgates had been maintaining some modicum of civility in Rosalind’s dealings with Robert were beginning to collapse, releasing all of her annoyance, her resentment, and, not least of all, blame. “You have no real interest in escape, which makes it my burden to find a way out of here. Of course, it hardly seems fair that the responsibility of escape should fall solely on me, especially when one considers, I am stuck here because of you!”
Robert’s eyes were wide. They argued often, but Rosalind wasn’t sure she had ever yelled at him in anger. If she had, he had never yelled back. Judging from Robert’s expression as he recovered from the initial shock of Rosalind’s outburst, that was about to change. “It’s not my fault you’re stuck here!”
Rosalind raised her eyebrows, surprised both that she was being yelled at and that Robert had the audacity to refute such blatant truths. “Who’s to blame then, Robert?”
“For you being stuck here? You! It’s my own fault I’m stuck here - and I really don’t mind it. I know you like to think we can only operate as a unit, but if you really want to escape, you’re free to do so without me.”
“Without you? Are you so happy here without me? Have you found a suitable replacement for me in that woman you work with?”
“She’s not like you!”
“So I’ve been told…”
“And I’m not looking to replace you!”
Rosalind shifted the gun in her arms and began to pace; not much, just a bit. “And how is it that I’m the one thinking we ‘operate as a unit’? You want to share the blame. I’m more than happy to just blame you.”
“You only came because you knew I was coming regardless!” Robert reached back to grip the bedpost but it was, presently, absent. He threw his hands in the air instead. “And I am happy here. I could live here, grow old here, die here and maybe leave a legacy that isn’t just unhappiness and death. You know it’s very freeing, existentially, to know the meaning of one’s life but not the outcome.”
“Really?” Rosalind sneered, unable to say much else just now. She could feel tears in her eyes, and it was an ordeal not to shed them. She hadn’t cried since she was a girl and saw no reason to start now.
“I can’t stomach the idea of living eternally with you, forever chasing down past sins we have no hope of righting. You act like it’s a heaven, but it’s not. It’s a hell - and my Hell is like Purgatory.”
Rosalind looked away as he spoke, blinking fast and hard a few times and taking a couple of deep breaths. “If you hate living with me so much-” Rosalind turned back to Robert, speaking slowly, calmly with just the slightest of tremors. “Why did you say you missed me?”
“Because I love you!” shouted Robert, accusingly. “I’m miserable without you!”
Rosalind had never received a verbal declaration of love before. It rather offended her. “I love you too!”
“I know!”
“I won’t live here! I’m miserable here! I’m leaving, and if you come with me, that’s your choice!”
“I know!” Robert said again, then paused, taking a deep breath. “I know,” he repeated. “I’m coming with you. I expected I would have to.”
“Then why have you been making such a fuss about it?” demanded Rosalind, who had not quite had her fill of yelling.
Robert glared at his sister. “Because I don’t have to be happy about it!”
Rosalind watched Robert a moment longer. She took a deep breath of her own, composing herself. “Fair enough,” she said, then shot him. She watched him flicker slightly then vanish, a startled look on his face unlike any she had seen him wear before. Rosalind took another deep breath, then turned the gun on herself.
It was a familiar sensation Rosalind felt next, like all of existence was flat and she was the only three-dimensional thing in it. Then she was falling; not very far, but falling none-the-less, onto a bed.
“You’re lucky we didn’t both appear here in the bed,” said Robert.
“I considered that and planned for it. Couldn’t have happened,” said Rosalind, though, in truth, it had been a bit of a concern. She leaned her head back and found Robert sitting at the head of the bed, arms and ankles crossed, wearing a decidedly sour expression. Behind him was the white void.
The power source was digging into her back. It took a bit of maneuvering for Rosalind to sit up. She stayed on the bed when she had done so, not trusting the look of the void.
“What now?” asked Robert.
Rosalind folded her legs to the side, tucking them under her skirt and situating the gun across her lap. “Now nothing,” she said. “I’m sure Rose knows we’re here.”
I DO. A face melted in from the void, hair floating around it in an ecstatic veil of orange.
Behind her, Rosalind felt Robert move on the bed. She didn’t look at him, instead, keeping her gaze fixed on Rose. “Send us home,” said Rosalind.
The great blue eyes narrowed. NO.
Rosalind got to her feet, standing on her toes to keep her heels from sinking into the mattress. She hoisted the gun, hitting a preset on the front of it. “Put us back together, or I shoot.”
The face tilted sideways, as if Rose were inclining her head.
“What will that do?” asked Robert, whispering needlessly.
“Send Rose - all of her - to the world we just left.”
“That will-”
“-Rip it apart, I expect.”
“You can’t,” hissed Robert.
“I don’t want to, but I will,” said Rosalind, finger on the trigger. “Put us back together. Restore our connection to our own universe. If I even suspect you of sending us back to one of your worlds, I will shoot. I don’t think I can miss. You’re everywhere here, aren’t you?”
I AM.
“Well,” prompted Rosalind “Get to it.”
“Rosalind,” said Robert.
YOU CAN’T DO THIS, finished Rose, voicing what Robert’s tone had implied.
“I will,” warned Rosalind.
YOU WON’T.
There was a finality to that. Won’t. Rose was omnipotent here. She would know.
Rosalind swallowed, looking down at the gun and letting her eyes unfocus. It was not often that she felt foolish. It was a terrible feeling. It made her dizzy. Her heel sank into the bed, tripping her. Rosalind’s breath caught, releasing when she felt Robert’s hands on her back and on her waist, slowing her descent to ease her down onto the bed beside him.
THIS HAS GONE ON LONG ENOUGH. The face dropped, suddenly speeding closer.
Rosalind and Robert both jumped, huddling together as Rose’s eyes blinked at them from across the mattress.
I WILL RETURN YOU TO ONE OF MY WORLDS.
Rosalind sat up a little straighter. “No, I won’t-”
DON’T WORRY, began Rose, interrupting her. THIS TIME YOU WILL NOT REMEMBER THAT WHICH LEAVES YOU RESTLESS.
“What?” asked Rosalind, speaking in unison with Robert this time.
I WILL LEAVE INTACT THOSE THINGS THAT MAKE YOU YOU. I WILL CAREFULLY EXTRACT EVERYTHING ELSE.
“Everything else?” repeated Rosalind.
I WILL ALTER THINGS. YOU DID NOT FIND A MASCULINE INCARNATION OF YOURSELF IN AN ALTERNATE REALITY. YOU FOUND YOUR WAY HERE. TO ME.
Rosalind’s fingers fumbled with the dials on her gun. “What about Robert?”
I WILL PUT HIM SOMEWHERE. I CAN ALTER HIS MEMORY AS WELL. HE WILL NOT BE UNHAPPY.
“You can’t do that,” said Robert, lamely. He couldn’t seem to come up with a reason why Rose couldn’t, not on such short notice.
Rosalind was surprised to see Rose hesitate anyway, orange brows coming to together to form a crease composed of void. In the confusion, Rosalind’s fingers slipped from the controls and found the trigger. She shot the bed.
They were falling - both Rosalind, Robert, and the bed. Rosalind saw a swirling nebulous sky; she saw the white side of tall buildings; then she heard the bed land. Its frame collapsed in on itself, but the mattress cushioned the fall somewhat. Rosalind bounced twice, crying out both times, when her back collided with the power source.
To her left, Rosalind heard Robert groan. She felt him reach out to find her - then, with one hand on her shoulder, sit up. “Where are we?” he asked, most likely instinctively; Rosalind thought it was obvious where they were.
“Lutetia,” she said, seething the word through her teeth.
Robert pulled Rosalind up by the shoulders and into a sitting position, moving her carefully. “Are you all right?” he asked.
There was no time for an answer. The earth-shaking roar of a massive collision sent them airborne again. Rosalind never hit the ground. She hung there, suspended by something - blue tendrils, she saw; crackling tendrils of electric matter that convulsed around her body and tingled her skin.
THIS HAS GONE FAR ENOUGH, Rose said again but, this time, there was a migraine-inducing edge of anger to the words ricocheting around in Rosalind’s skull.
In the distance, buildings crumbled; the road collapsed; chunks of them both broke off and floated into the nebulous sky or crumbled away into nothing. A ball of electricity - like the tendrils extending from it to hold Rosalind, but condensed - sat in the center of it all.
“Rosalind!” shouted Robert.
Rosalind saw him just below her, picking himself up off the trembling cobblestone streets.
The tendrils holding Rosalind shifted to her back. They tightened around the gun’s power source. Rosalind dangled from the straps then and, realizing this, contorted her arms. “Robert!” she said, to get his attention, and dropped from them.
Robert caught her - or tried to. In the end, they were both on the ground; but not for long. Their agreement to run was an unspoken one.
Robert led the way, fingers digging into Rosalind’s forearm. Her heels made her slow. She’d seldom had cause to run in them and never this fast. They tripped her constantly, twisting her ankles this way and that. Robert turned back to steady her more than once, and the expression he assumed every time was one of horror. Rosalind glanced back only twice, but she shared that sentiment.
The ball of energy was still there and, inside it, if one looked at it at just the right angle and from the corner of their eye, there was the rough shape of a person. It was Rose. She had been transfused into this reality along with them. She seemed to be upset about that. She seemed to be following them.
WHERE ARE YOU- “Goooiiing?” Rose demanded, the last word becoming a physically verbalized screech that projected a shockwave. Rosalind and Robert both stopped, bracing themselves against it as it whipped at their clothes and hair.
Rose’s question was a valid one. Rosalind had no particular destination in mind, just: away.
Robert turned to keep running. Rosalind moved with him, but not far. More blue, electric tendrils shot past, looping around their path and barring their way. Rosalind watched as the tendrils convulsed, contracting inward to garrote reality itself.
The air tore. A wide fissure opened in front of them, its edges ragged and charred, crumbling like burned paper. Through it, Rosalind could see herself. Her brother was there too, and their machine. It had already been sabotaged. Rosalind could tell. Rosalind recognized the day.
The scene was depicted in countless dots; electric blue celestial bodies. They made Rosalind think of phantoms, synaptic ghosts of memories - but then the machine backfired, and she could feel the heat from the explosion.
To the left and the right there were buildings. Behind them, there was Rose. Rosalind and Robert pressed on through the remains of their own laboratory. It was more solid than it looked. Robert tripped over his own “dead” body. Rosalind wobbled on top of debris. They scrambled through the wreckage only to have the street on the other side of it buckle upward, webbing itself with cracks that spat static.
“Where?” Rosalind asked.
“Up there,” Robert answered. He ducked down, wrapped his arms around her knees, and lifted her up.
“What-” began Rosalind, but stopped, finding herself suddenly in blue. She was through another tear of something remembered; an wide and empty hallway where blue-dot corpses floated. It was a different city, a space station - something not made by a Lutece, but by someone who had stood on their shoulders.
Rosalind left Robert’s shoulders now, becoming weightless. He grabbed her ankle to steady her as she looked around. “There,” she said, and kicked off carefully in the direction of a hose dangling from exposed paneling in the ceiling. She caught it and kept going, twisting in midair and stretching out her legs for something solid. She bumped against the corpse, then a wall. Rosalind kicked off the latter.
“Hurry!” Robert urged.
“I am!” Rosalind snapped, barely managing to hook her foot around something in time to keep from dropping right out of the tear. She threw down the hose, and Robert grabbed it. Neither of them were much for athletics, but it wasn’t much of a climb. Still, Rosalind grabbed the back of his coat when he was near enough, hauling him up and into weightlessness.
They both pushed off then, down to the end of the hallway, to the automatic door. “It’s not on,” said Rosalind, kicking the thing, then scrambling quickly to steady herself in the air.
“I can see that,” said Robert, already attempting to prise a control panel from the wall.
“You’re doing that wrong,” said Rosalind, once she had made it back to his side.
“Tell me, Rosalind. Do you know how to get the door open?” Robert yanked several wires free, cursing softly when he did so.
Rosalind didn’t, but she was about to give it a shot when a flicker of movement caught her eye. There on the thick glass separating the station’s interior from a scenic view of space, something was taking form. It was blurry - an image composed of polygons, composed of blue dots. It was one of Booker’s spiritual successors, she realized: the AI program that had merged disastrously with man.
HOLD STILL, said Rose in time to the movement of pixelized lips.
Robert raised his head from his work, staring as Rose’s face stared back. Rosalind shouldered him out of the way, shoving her arm in to the elbow to grope blindly for a release mechanism.
There was a sound like groaning. Rosalind looked up to see the glass between them and space flexing around the shape of Rose. Robert crowded in beside Rosalind again, connecting unlikely wires. Rosalind looked away from the window and redoubled her efforts, knowing it was useless… knowing all of it was useless… but they had to try… anything was better than…
The glass broke. They were shot out into space - or, rather, some unreal approximation of it. Rosalind was holding onto Robert’s arm, but she lost him. She was too disoriented, spinning too fast. Head over feet over head over feet. A blur of blue dots on darker blue was all she saw.
And then it was over. She fell out of space and was just falling. Not shooting off at an odd angle, weightless. There was gravity here, and her body obeyed it. The wind stung her eyes for a couple of seconds, then she landed, hard. Rosalind screamed, then screamed again once her eyes had stopped watering long enough to see.
Bodies. Hundred of them, thousands maybe. More blue ghosts that were distressingly solid. They were in a mass grave with walls made of rock. The city beneath the earth. Rosalind recognized it and, in recognizing it, regained her focus.
“Robert!” No answer. She looked around. She put her hands on a thigh and her legs across someone’s chest and, unsteadily, got to her knees. “Robert!” She saw him, orange hair incongruous against all that blue. He didn’t respond, but he seemed to be sitting up and wasn’t far. Rosalind crawled to him.
Robert was sitting awkwardly, hands on his knees as if afraid to touch anything. He was looking at something. Rosalind followed his gaze and found two Luteces; blue Luteces, unluckier Luteces. They were not scattered across the probability space. They were dead at the bottom of a pit; assassinated separately but together in death, such as it was.
“We know,” said Rosalind, gripping her brother’s shoulder. “We’ve watched this. We’ve watched them die. Come on, now. We have to move.”
Robert looked away from the Luteces then around, at all the others. He tried to say something, but failed.
“We have to move,” repeated Rosalind, but now she was looking around as well. The walls were too high. Even if they weren’t, she saw no realistic way to climb them.
Rosalind sighed and sat beside her brother. She felt it, too. They’d both seen this, but never when they’d been so human, never when they’d felt this vulnerable.
“Do you think we’re selfish?” asked Rosalind, barely able to hear her own words, she had said them so quietly. “I know I asked you something like that, not so long ago… I just… I wonder sometimes…”
“Me too.”
“I never meant for any of this. I can’t make decisions for every Lutece who has ever existed. It’s just that… I wonder… hypothetically… If it all came down to me, to my decision: all this for you… Knowing what I do now, I wonder if I would… I think… I’m afraid… I would.”
“Me too.”
No answer to her initial question seemed to be forthcoming. Rosalind decided it probably didn’t matter. “You should try not to think about it,” said Rosalind. “I try not to-” Rosalind dropped a marginal drop as the bodies shifted suddenly beneath her.
Robert gripped her forearm, and she gripped his. The bodies shifted once more then began to slide, toward the center of the pit and down. The process was slow at first then torrential. Rosalind watched her own body tumble past, into some unseen sinkhole.
It got them both moving again. Both Rosalind and Robert scrambled backwards at first, then turned. Hand-over-fist they climbed bodies until there was no more climbing to be done; the bottom of the pit dropped out beneath them.
Rosalind managed to hold onto her brother as they fell this time. It was no easy feat with the other bodies falling around them, but that would clear away soon enough. They were reaching the edge of this tear. Rosalind saw the bodies hit the boundaries of their existence and explode, shattering against an invisible wall.
Rosalind passed through the tear with Robert and into another. It whipped them sideways, giving them a new direction for down. There was something hot and acidic rising in Rosalind’s throat, but she kept it down.
The wind was still fierce, but she caught glimpses of things through streaming eyes. They were falling past Columbia, dropping fast between airships and undocked city blocks. A skyline whizzed past and when Rosalind turned her head to it, she saw people riding the rails. Even in all blue, she recognized the Vox. She lost sight of them when she passed into a cloud and out of the tear.
No tear came next. They were simply falling in Lutetia now - what was left of it. The city had broken. Its streets were in pieces. Its buildings floated freely. Here and there assorted objects had dislodged themselves and tumbled this way and that, bouncing between the pull of several sources of gravity.
A confusion of up and down slowed Rosalind and Robert. They drifted between storefronts and park benches before a passing slab of street won out. They landed on their feet and immediately ducked down as the street continued its slow, somersaulting trajectory through the remains of Lutetia.
Rosalind looked around. There was no sign of Rose, but it was doubtful she had just left them alone. What Rosalind did see was her statue and near that, “The arch.”
“What good will that do us?” asked Robert, with good reason. There had been no indication before that the arch was anything but one-way.
“It must maintain some sort of link, back to our universe.” It sounded like a weak plan, even to Rosalind’s own ears, but: “Surely it’s better than just wandering.”
Robert nodded, once.
When the street they were on turned to face the street with the arch, they jumped for it. The pull of gravity let up some but not enough. They ducked down again, discussing their options as the street beneath them completed another revolution. Rosalind made a point to remove her heels while they waited. When the street turned to the arch again, Rosalind jumped and Robert heaved her upward. He jumped too, hand still holding hers.
Rosalind was flung sideways, dangling from her arm. She seethed, feeling pain shoot down her elbow and around in the socket, like shards of glass. Stronger and more sobering was the fear in that moment she hung there, all at once certain she would either tumble back down to the spinning street with Robert or, worse, slip from his grip.
But the balance shifted quickly, like she had pulled him off a cliff. They fell to a patch of grass near the statue, not that it cushioned the fall much. Rosalind hit with her knees and with the arm that didn’t ache. She pushed back clumps of dislodged dirt and grass as she rolled onto her side, moaning.
She and her brother belonged in a lab, not in a situation like this. All the adrenaline in the world couldn’t keep it from getting to her.
“Are you all right?” asked Robert, for the second time.
Rosalind opened her eyes to find him leaning over her; expression concerned and hand at her chin, thumbing something warm and wet from the corner of her mouth. Rosalind saw that his face was bruised and his nose was bleeding. Bizarrely, it reminded her of happier days. “No,” she said and reached up her good arm. “Let us hurry.”
Robert took her arm and helped her to her feet. They were at the base of the statue. The arch was just beyond it. Rosalind took a deep breath and limped toward it, still unsure of what it was she hoped to accomplish there.
THIS ISN’T WHAT I WANTED.
The statue of Rose reached down, bending in ways a statue is never intended to bend. Whole chunks of it broke off and fell, exposing the blue tendrils that composed its skeleton. With both hands it reach for Rosalind. Its hands circled her waist, electric joints crackling.
Rosalind threw her weight to one side, trying to free herself before she could be lifted from the ground. Robert wrapped his arms around her upper-body and pulled. Together, they nearly had her clear of the thing before the statue shifted its grip, raising one hand from Rosalind long enough to brush Robert aside.
Robert fell back against the grass. The statue lifted Rosalind up. She shrieked, afraid but mostly just furious. “You cannot do this!” she shouted, knowing very well Rose probably could and likely would. She twisted her body and repeatedly shoved at the statue’s hands and arms, ignoring the considerable pain it was causing her.
“PLEASE. DON’T CAUSE YOURSELF FURTHER INJURY.”
Rosalind heard a physical voice again. It wasn’t a screech this time, but rather a booming and tremulous warble. Rosalind looked up and saw Rose.
She floated high above, all of that energy condensed to the luminous shape of a woman. From this distance, she looked featureless, identity distinguishable only by a fiery halo of orange hair.
“I KNOW IT UPSETS YOU NOW, BUT THAT WILL PASS.” Rose began to descend.
Around Rosalind more tears were opening. To her right, panicking people were being shoved from burning walkways that stretched across a rainforest canopy. To her left, a blue phantom of Rosalind Straussler bled to death on a dock. Straight ahead, Columbia smoldered. Behind her, Rapture sank.
“WILL YOU PLEASE STOP THAT?” asked Rose, just above her now.
Rosalind stopped struggling. “Beg pardon?”
“THE TEARS,” said Rose.
“Oh,” said Robert.
Rosalind looked down at Robert. He was still sitting in the grass.
“Surely not…” Robert rose unsteadily to his feet. Rosalind was watching him, puzzled, when it hit her.
It was as if something had collided with her. It knocked Rosalind’s breath from her lungs but, after that, it was… an unspeakably wonderful relief. She smiled. Her body relaxed in the statue’s grip.
She and Robert were connected again.
“That’s it then.” Robert raised his eyebrows. “This is actually somewhat embarrassing.”
WHAT? asked Rose. She hadn’t said anything, hadn’t even thought the word; it was an intense confusion she was transmitting. Robert looked up, raising his voice to address her.
“There’s been a bit of a mix-up. I… How should I put this? Not to diminish your godhood, but I’m afraid I’m…” Robert seemed to be struggling with how to word this. She held his hands apart - one just above the other. “I’m, maybe, just one level higher.”
WHAT? asked Rose.
“What?” asked Rosalind.
But Rosalind didn’t wait for an answer. She felt her connection to her own universe restored, and she felt Robert leaving. Wasting no time at all, Rosalind followed.
Rosalind appeared on a dock, outside of a lighthouse. Robert was already there. He looked like always and appeared to be in good health. All the aches and pains had left Rosalind’s own body, still it hurt both of them a bit when she slapped him on the arm.
“What was that for?”
“I don’t know yet,” said Rosalind, clasping her hands in front of herself and waiting.
Robert sighed. He turned and looked out into the night, where lighthouses shown like stars. “I unintentionally created a reality.”
“You unintentionally created a reality?”
“That is what I just said, yes.”
“Robert, that was an entirely different universe.”
“Yes, well, I always rather liked the idea of a clean slate.”
“But an alternate version of myself made the universe.”
“An alternate version based around my idea of you- Ow!”
Rosalind slapped him on the arm again. This time Robert slapped her back and, for a moment, the conversation dissolved into a brief shoving match.
“I am not at all like that woman, Robert,” said Rosalind, relenting as they took a step away from each other. “How did you even manage that?”
Robert’s arms were crossed over his chest. He cut his eyes over to her when she spoke. “What?”
“Creating a reality.”
“I haven’t the slightest.”
“You don’t know how you did it? How can you not know how you did it?”
Robert waved an arm at the ocean of lighthouses before them. “The longer I live like this, the less I seem to know. ‘Scio me nihil scire.’
“Don’t say things like that.”
“Why not?”
“That’s a terrible thing to say. I don’t want to hear it.” Rosalind scanned the horizon. “We’ll figure this out,” she said, mind wandering. In the distance, a light blinked into existence. “Oh… That was an alarmingly easy thing to do.”
“Don’t make more!” snapped Robert. “That’s just… that’s irresponsible.”
“And possibly dangerous,” Rosalind added, thoughtfully. She walked to the end of the dock and sat down on its edge, letting her feet dangle. Robert came to sit on her right, and they sat there in companionable silence, reflecting.
“Regardless of whether or not you were responsible for our predicament, you were willing to leave with me,” said Rosalind, after what might have been minutes or relative weeks.
Robert raised his shoulders in a small shrug. “You were willing to go through the arch with me. It only seemed fair.”
Rosalind considered that. She placed her palms flat behind her and leaned back on them. “I do think about it.”
“About what?” asked Robert.
“About our… legacy; about Luteces. Maybe I don’t think about it as much as you - I don’t see the use in that, honestly - but I do think about it, and it does bother me.”
“I know.”
“And, I believe, what it comes down to is that… We are not very good people.”
“A sound theory.”
“But we try, and I expect that’s more than you can say for most.” Rosalind focused on the stretch of ocean across from them. “I have an idea.”
Up from the ocean, rose a lighthouse with no light. Water poured from it, leaving the docks damp.
“What did we just talk about?” Robert rounded on her. “You’ve already created one reality you haven’t even visited. I’ve created a reality and a universe. I’ve likely just given a god an existential crisis, and I feel terrible about it, just terrible. I would go back and apologize, but I’m afraid she would destroy me.”
Rosalind tossed her head, rolling her eyes at Robert’s outburst. “Oh, calm down. There’s nothing in it.”
Robert’s expression softened. He took a more serious look at the lighthouse.
“It’s for when we’re ready to start again,” explained Rosalind. “We will make a reality there, a very simple one, when we are ready. We will leave from there and make a universe all our own, much like Rose did… Well, not exactly like Rose did. She was a linear Lutece when she went in; we are more than that.”
Robert looked back at Rosalind. His mouth had opened slightly, though he didn’t look about to say anything.
“I hope we won’t be ready for some time,” continued Rosalind, looking away. “There’s more in this universe I would like to see. I suppose we could always return, but I feel a universe could benefit from us finding where this one went wrong… I realize there’s no guarantee that we’ll be better gods than we have been people, but it’s something to look forward to. It’s an unknown.”
Robert put an arm around Rosalind. She rested her head against his shoulder. “That sounds good,” said Robert.
“Really?”
“It really… Is that an Elizabeth?”
Rosalind sat up straight again. “Where?”
“At our lighthouse,” said Robert, pointing.
Rosalind squinted. It was difficult to see in the dark, but she could still make out the shape climbing the steps to the door. “Yes, it is.”
“What is she doing?”
“Going inside, it seems.”
The door closed behind Elizabeth. The light on the lighthouse came on.
“Elizabeth stole our universe,” said Robert.
“She created a reality,” corrected Rosalind.
“She appropriated our reality. The one we were saving for a universe.”
“We can make another.”
“We’re going to break this universe. We’re going to upset something, I know it.”
“I don’t think so… But we’ll create another empty lighthouse only when we’re actually ready to enter it. Just to be safe.”
“We should really do something about the mess we’ve made trying to fix the mess we’ve made.”
“Yes.” Rosalind stood. She reached down, offering her hand to Robert. “Off to find Elizabeth then?”
“One of them. Yes. We’d better.” Robert took Rosalind’s hand. He got to his feet. “Columbia?”
“Yes,” she said, eyes finding the correct lighthouse in the distance. “That’s the first stop, anyway.”