“An ally’s an ally, no matter what they look for. Beggars can’t be choosers, and unless you’re in an absolutely superior position, neither can you.”
—Alexander Healy
Sitting down to dinner inside a giant termite mound, and other sentences I’ve never considered before
THEIR PATRIARCH TURNED OUT to be a smiling man roughly Thomas’s apparent age, with paler spots than most of the others, and who went by the unprepossessing name of “Kenneth.” That was almost reassuring. Real-life cult leaders don’t usually call themselves “Bloodfang the Consumer,” but they also aren’t generally content to go around being named “Kenneth.”
True to Helen’s notes, these people had interbred with a Lilu several years previous, and were happy to accept our genetically scrambled refugees. The Murrays and the others might not have a single dimension where they belonged without standing out, but this world was willing to have them, and most of them were glad to stay and settle, while the rest were at least ready to give it a chance. They’d been on the move long enough.
Besides, there was food here. A meaty stew I was willing to bet Sally didn’t recognize as being insect-based, and which I was equally willing to bet none of them would care about being insect-based, since it was plentiful and good. Roast vegetables that didn’t taste like anything on Earth, and even bread, which had a nutty aftertaste that told me they’d been using crickets for flour. So more livestock than agriculture, and very little of it mammalian in origin. That was fine. Our people could survive here.
Lilu genetics are unique, as far as anyone’s been able to tell. They can reproduce with virtually anything, and they don’t have allergies, making protein incompatibilities unheard of. And these people, who were coming from a similar starting tech level, would be able to assimilate into their society without making a ripple, replenishing their gene pool and answering the question of how people who no longer had a world and didn’t belong to any single dominant species were going to survive.
We’d done it. We’d pulled three hundred people out of a dying bottle dimension, and we’d managed to find them a place where they could be safe. Happiness wasn’t guaranteed, but then, happiness is never guaranteed.
Thomas and I sat together on a low cushion, watching as Sally compared spears with some of the locals, all of them very interested in one another’s weapons. People were sitting everywhere in the vast lower chamber of the termite mound, and massive glowing grubs covered the ceiling, lighting things up almost as well as fire would have. They were absolutely necessary, since there were no windows. None of the lowest chambers had windows.
“The hunters in the dark can fit through the smallest spaces,” said Kenneth, when I asked about the lack of windows. “They only dare try our walls so far, though; higher up, the steeds lie waiting, and are always willing to accept a meal which presents itself freely.”
I paused, puzzling through that statement. “So the giant spiders would come in the windows if you had any, but they won’t climb to the top of the mound or the mantises will eat them?”
Kenneth nodded. “Exactly so.”
“Huh.”
He smiled, the polite, bland smile of someone making nice with a guest who they hoped was going to leave soon, and drifted over to speak with a cluster of refugees. They laughed, agreeing with something he’d said.
Thomas’s translation spell would leave with us when we went, and these people would have to learn to communicate the old-fashioned way, but looking around, it seemed like they’d be more than pleased to make the effort. The mound had a fairly large population of the spotted, semi-feline people, and our group had a reasonable number of striped, semi-feline people. I guess “semi-feline” was a not uncommon body form in the adjacent dimensions. The spotty ones seemed to be the original inhabitants; the less-spotty ones, like Kenneth, were direct descendants of the incubus who’d come to visit a few generations back.
Interestingly, he’d been traveling in the company of several Johrlac, and even more interestingly, according to Kenneth, we had just missed a similar group—where “just missed” meant “it happened about a year and a half ago,” if I was doing the local time conversion correctly. No guarantees. But apparently, a group consisting of a Johrlac, an Incubus, and a couple of sorcerers had come crashing through, along with a fairly hefty chunk of masonry, and upset the spiders something awful before leaving again, taking their masonry with them.
It was hard to tell from Kenneth’s descriptions, but it sure sounded like he was talking about a bunch of my grandkids. Which would be a pretty big coincidence, and just made me more sure that he was talking about people I knew. My family lives in the pause between “possible” and “probable,” courtesy of Mom, and if it seemed too good to be true, it probably was. Maybe that’s not how it works for anybody else. It’s how things have always worked for me.
The visitors had been accompanied by a horrifying number of cuckoos, most of whom had been eaten by giant spiders or found dead in the fields after the group took their masonry and went home. Honestly, the whole thing was a little confusing, and I snuggled into Thomas as I tried to puzzle my way through it, finishing my stew and enjoying the somewhat novel sensation of having enough to eat while in a safe, enclosed place.
Thomas skimmed a hand across my hair, the sensation light enough to be barely present. I tilted my head back and looked at him; he smiled at me.
“I think we’re nearly done,” he said. “If all my people choose to stay here . . .”
“Then we head to Ithaca, tell Helen and Phoebe we’re finished, and go back to Buckley to figure out what happens next,” I said, agreeably. “I hope Sally likes the tailypo.”
Thomas snorted. “Buckley is still up for discussion, and I hope the tailypo like me, since all the ones who knew me have long since passed away, and I don’t particularly want a hostile conspiracy of lemurs in my living room.”
“They’re going to love you,” I said. “Just like their ancestors did. Just like I do.”
He leaned down and he kissed me, and I didn’t care that we were in a room full of people, or that the ceiling was covered in giant bugs, or any of those things. All that mattered was here, and now, and the fact that after all this time, I had accomplished my goal. I got to have new goals now, ones that were maybe a little less straightforward but would almost certainly be healthier, or at least involve less gross physical trauma. I could go home, and it would be home, really home, not a waystation between me and the next leg of my wild goose chase. A little public kissing was nothing compared to that kind of relief.
Besides, it wasn’t like we’d had a lot of privacy since leaving the bottle dimension, and as long as we were both fully clothed, there wasn’t much we could do that would feel like crossing a line.
Sally plopped down next to me. I disengaged from kissing Thomas to twist and look at her.
“All done showing off your poking sticks?” I asked.
“Too many Lilu in one room,” she said. “The smell is starting to make my head spin.”
Lilu—incubi and succubi, in the more common usage—sweat pheromonal signals that make them almost irresistibly attractive to people with a compatible biology. It’s never had much impact on the members of my direct family. I figure it’s part and parcel of the ridiculous luck we all got from Mom. Sally and Thomas didn’t have the same luxury, and while about half our company was part Lilu, we’d been traveling outside, where the open air could diffuse the signals.
That explained Thomas kissing me in front of other people. Not that he’s been particularly shy about kissing me since we were reunited—we’re both trying to make up for lost time. But he wasn’t normally that casual about initiating. I adjusted my position, leaning against him as I focused on Sally.
“Does it feel like anyone’s influencing you intentionally?”
She shook her head. “No, just general background noise. But there’s enough women here who fit my standards that I’m starting to get a little flustered. I know we can’t go outside without making ourselves targets for the giant spiders, but is there any place we could go to be a little less surrounded by people who might accidentally cause a massive consent violation?”
Most Lilu are very aware of the effect they have on other people, and take steps to keep themselves from influencing anyone by mistake. In this case, however, we had the Murrays, descendants of some not-very-nice people who hadn’t been shy about using their natural talents to find mates once they landed in the bottle world. The modern Murrays were more restrained, and also had weaker powers of persuasion, thanks to the genetic contributions of their non-Lilu ancestors. That didn’t mean they didn’t walk around in a low-grade funk of supernatural Axe body spray at all times. And then there were the locals, who were just as far removed from their incubus ancestor, but were still sweating organic love potion. None of them had any good reason to have learned to control it, since Lilu can’t easily affect other Lilu, and their pheromones don’t affect close relatives on the non-Lilu side. Meaning that even the non-Lilu locals were safe due to other family ties, and this whole place was a sexy, sexy soup of inescapable perfumes.
“Good question,” I said, and rose, pausing to kiss Thomas on the top of the head before I trotted toward Kenneth. He turned and blinked at me, somewhat nonplussed, although I didn’t know whether he was thrown by my approach or general lack of deference. I’m not great at “unearned respect.” It’s not one of my big callings in life.
“Hey, bud,” I said. “So we have a tiny problem.”
“What would that be?”
“See, you lot are descended from that Incubus ancestor you’re so proud of, and so are a lot of the folks we brought with us,” I said. “Me, Thomas, and Sally, though, we’re just human. No extra bits or bonuses. So the pheromones are getting to be sort of a lot, and we need to move to another room so we can breathe.”
“You are free to go,” he said, imperiously.
“And that would be the tiny problem. I don’t want to wander into the stable and get eaten by one of your giant mantis friends or something, so we’ll need someone to show us where we can safely go, and even more importantly than that, when we leave, the translation spell that’s letting you all talk to each other so easily is going to go with us. Sorcerer, remember?” I shrugged, trying my best to look at least a little apologetic. I was afraid I didn’t do a very good job. That’s something else I’ve never been particularly good at. “Thought it would be polite to warn you that you’re about to have a language barrier all up in here.”
“We have navigated language barriers before,” he said stiffly.
“Not like this. They speak about two dozen languages between them, and in some cases, the kids and parents don’t actually know the same one. The dangers of raising your children under a translation spell. The kids speak English. The parents speak whatever was spoken back in their original dimensions, and they’ve never had reason to learn anything else.”
Kenneth blinked slowly, finally looking as if he might actually understand.
“Anyway, the spell travels with Thomas, and we have to get out of here before something inappropriate happens, so if you could brace yourself and warn your people, that would be good.” I smiled thinly. “Think of it as a test run for what’s going to happen when we move on to the next dimension. Because we’re not coming back here.”
That wasn’t entirely true. Thomas would probably want to come back eventually, to check on the people he’d been taking care of for decades. But I wouldn’t be coming with him unless he wanted me to, and he definitely wouldn’t be taking any of them back to Earth with him. There’s taking in strays—something we’re very, very good at—and then there’s setting people up to be miserable, which we mostly try to avoid.
Kenneth nodded. “I will tell my people,” he said, and moved to do just that.
I walked back to where I’d left Sally and Thomas. Sally was still sitting there, but Thomas was on the other side of the room, in quiet conversation with one of the Murray guards who’d always taken a local leadership position within the sub-group. I nodded toward him.
“Letting them know the plan?”
“Boss didn’t want people to panic when they stopped making sense,” said Sally. Her voice had taken on a nasal quality; she was talking without breathing through her nose. Smart girl. “Kenneth down?”
“I don’t think he’s happy, but he’s going to send someone to see us to a room where we can be safe and breathe easier, and he knows the translation spell won’t hold.”
“Great.” Sally sighed and looked up at me, seeming briefly, terribly young. She was in her early twenties, physically barely younger than me, but she’d been a kid when all this started. I offered her my hand.
She took it, pulling herself to her feet. I smiled encouragingly as I let go.
“Hey, we’re almost done. Home soon. Home, and running water, and all the comforts of life on Earth. I mean, you’ll be in the middle of nowhere, Michigan, but it’s going to seem like paradise after these last few years.”
Sally paused. Then, taking her hand carefully out of mine, she asked, “You’re really willing to let me come live with you? I figured you and the boss would want to have some privacy once you got back.”
Thomas was on his way back over to us, accompanied by two of Kenneth’s guards. I raised a finger.
“Let’s put a pin in that for just a second, while we get settled, but then I want to talk about it, so don’t forget,” I said. Then I turned to Thomas, offering him a dazzlingly bright smile. “Okay, sweetheart, where are we going?”
Where we were going was another room, about half the size of the one we’d been in, with two walls taken up by rough-hewn bookshelves stocked with hand-stitched books, and a third covered by a sheet of slate, creating a primitive chalkboard. I walked toward it, studying the figures and formulae written there. It was clearly Johrlac math, designed to break the laws of physics and the laws of nature in the same delicate cut.
It was just as clearly Sarah’s handwriting. She might as well have signed her name. I touched the chalkboard, smearing one of the numbers, and smiled over my shoulder at Thomas and Sally.
“We’re going home,” I said.
The guards who’d escorted us here murmured their regards and left, presumably returning to the chaos that must have overtaken the main room by now. “It’s going to sound like the United Nations in there,” said Sally, throwing herself down on a pile of heaped-up animal hides. Some of them looked mammalian, which was good; it increased the odds that our hosts were originally from around here, and not more invaders. After Naga and the situation on Empusa, I was a lot less well inclined toward intentionally invasive species.
“What makes you say that?” Thomas walked up and put his arms around my waist, looking at the chalkboard. “Have you mastered Johrlac dimensional calculus while I was away?”
“No, although I’ve learned how to recognize it.” I twisted so I was facing him. “I say we’re going home because we are, and because those other travelers Kenneth was talking about are ours. Sarah and Artie for sure, probably Annie and one of her friends. If Sarah’s doing dimension-hopper math, she’s gotten a lot more comfortable with herself since the last time I saw her. That’s a good thing. Poor kid ties herself in knots over absolutely everything.”
“You use all these words like they’re supposed to mean something to me,” said Sally. “What’s dimensional calculus? And you used that word earlier—‘Johrlac.’ What does it mean?”
“Those are really two halves of the same question,” said Thomas, letting go of me so he could turn to her. I managed, barely, not to glower. “The Johrlac are residents of a dimension called Johrlar. I’ve never been there. Alice?”
“Nope, me neither,” I said. “They’re a little xenophobic on Johrlar. Something about not wanting outsiders to taint their perfect hive mind.”
“Hive . . . mind?”
“They’re telepaths,” said Thomas. “A true Johrlac lives in perfect harmony with their fellows, barely distinct from the minds around them.”
“And if they’re not a true Johrlac—if they’re an individual or someone who likes to think for themselves—the rest of the hive doesn’t consider them a Johrlac at all. We call the members of the species who aren’t part of the hive ‘cuckoos,’ because they tend to infiltrate human spaces and change people’s memories to make it like they’ve always been there. Sarah is technically a cuckoo, although if she’s started doing Johrlac math, she may not be calling herself that anymore.”
Sally blinked, clearly overwhelmed by the onslaught of information.
Thomas picked up the thread again: “Johrlac and cuckoos are the same species, divided by a manner of thinking, and they can both do amazing things. Including crossing dimensional boundaries without sorcery or drawing on the local pneuma in any way I’ve ever been able to verify. They use complicated hyperdimensional math that can bridge the gaps without any magical support.”
“And they’re not bound to linear distances the way we are,” I said. “We literally can’t jump straight from here to Earth. We have to go through at least one dimension that touches on both worlds. In this case, we’re planning to use Ithaca, because we promised Helen and Phoebe we’d tell them when we were heading home, and because we know they’re friendly there. But we could go in another direction if we wanted to, as long as we went somewhere that had a shared boundary with Earth. Johrlac don’t need to do that. They just fill in the equation for the world they want, and then they go. I mean, it costs, sometimes.”
“Costs?”
“I can’t open a gateway large enough or difficult enough to kill myself,” said Thomas. “Even if I wanted to, my magic would refuse the attempt. It’s why I was unable to open a pathway out of the killing jar before Alice arrived draped in pneuma and willing to play battery for my endeavor. If I had needed to pull that much out of myself, I wouldn’t have been able to. The spell would have fizzled before it killed me.”
“Johrlac, though . . . they’re not pulling from themselves, they’re running math through themselves, and that works differently,” I said. “So they can have an equation that’s too big for the mathematician, and it can short out their brains. Sarah must have worked this spell correctly, or she’d be a corpse somewhere in the basement, and not gone along with whatever these nice folks mean by ‘masonry.’ And if she’s doing dimensional math powerful enough to relocate buildings, she’s doing pretty well.”
“Sarah is the adopted granddaughter,” said Sally, carefully.
“Adopted something or other,” I agreed. “She’s Kevin’s wife’s sister, but she’s the same age as the grandkids, so she’s functionally a granddaughter. I’d say you’re going to like her, but I can’t actually be sure about that. Sarah’s pretty shy. She doesn’t like most people, unless they’re secretly comic books. Are you secretly a comic book?”
“I don’t think so,” said Sally. “I think I’d know if I were. Pretty sure I’m just a girl from Maine.”
“About that,” said Thomas. “When I came over in the other room, the two of you seemed to be discussing what was going to happen when we got back to Earth. I think we all have some assumptions. It might be good to clear them up now.”
“I know . . .” Sally began, then hesitated, looking at her feet as she tried to sort through her words. Finally, she looked back up, and said, “I know you think families should stay together, and you have this idea about finding my parents when we get back, see if I can’t go on home to them. But they’re not . . . they’re not like you. There’s no way I could explain everything to them. For them, I disappeared and I probably died, and coming back now would just rip open all those old wounds and convince them I was a liar. James was always more family to me than they were.”
Thomas blinked, taken aback.
“They acted like they couldn’t be racist because they adopted a Korean kid,” said Sally. “They never learned to speak Korean, or tried to make sure I kept any sort of connection to my heritage, or anything like that. It would have been work, and they’d already done all the work of adopting a needy foreign kid because their church told them it would be a good thing. They hated that I liked girls. Mom was in total denial. Said I’d get over it, and James and I would settle down and get married and have lots of happy babies. Dad said it was just a phase and everyone’s confused when they’re a kid. They didn’t beat me. They made sure I had food and shoes, and they paid for me to go to cheer camp and they didn’t get mad that my best friend was a boy, or when I went to senior prom with James. They were probably real upset when I disappeared. Only at least half of it was for show, because they knew they were supposed to be real upset when their only kid vanished. Either they’re enjoying being childless, or they have a new kid in my room by now. Hoping that this time, they’ll get a dutiful daughter instead of a screw-up.”
I stepped away from Thomas. “You’re not a screw-up. You stayed alive in a place that wanted you dead, and you’re only the second person I’ve met who made their crossroads deal for a good reason. Thomas was the first.”
He snorted. “Of course you’d think so.”
“I mean, sure. If you hadn’t done it, I’d be dead, and while I might have come back as a ghost, I probably wouldn’t have, and the kids wouldn’t have existed. I like the kids. I like the grandkids, too. They’re a net benefit to the world. So yeah, I think your deal was made for a good reason. Sally, I don’t know yet if her deal was a net benefit to the world, but since the boy she made it for is running around with the grandkids, I’m willing to bank on ‘yes.’ You are both saints who didn’t deserve what the crossroads did to you, and when we get home, you can have cake.”
“I miss cake,” said Sally.
The mice, who had been riding quietly in my pack, cheered, ear-splittingly loud. We all winced.
“Do you still maintain a colony in Michigan?” asked Thomas.
I nodded. “I do.”
“Very well, then. Sally, I shan’t ask you to look for your family, only tell you that you’re welcome to do so if you desire, and your penance for choosing to remain lost to them will be life with a full colony of Aeslin mice.”
“The mice are pretty cool,” she said, with a sideways smile. “They keep making religious rituals out of things I say and shit, and that’s neat.”
“It’s neat now, when you have one priest,” I said. “Once you have an entire clergy, you may think differently. Thomas? Does that mean you’re okay with going back to Michigan?”
There were so many things we’d been putting off deciding, because we had so far to go before we’d be going home and needing to worry about them. Sally had always been something of a given, even if Thomas had believed there was some way she wouldn’t be; she was his kid, even if he hadn’t set out to adopt her, and I knew a familial bond when I saw one. And yeah, I might get frustrated sometimes, but I wasn’t frustrated enough to try to separate them. I don’t think I could ever be that frustrated.
But where we wound up after we got back to Earth . . . that had been up in the air. On the one hand, there was Michigan. Buckley Township, where we had the house and the tailypo and the Red Angel, and all the other things that would be at least somewhat familiar to the both of us. On the other hand, there was Portland, Oregon, where both our adult children and the majority of our grandchildren could be found. Thomas was just as focused on the importance of family as I was—more, maybe, since he’d never voluntarily run away from them. He wanted to get to know the kids. That meant being near them.
He smiled and reached out to push my hair back from one side of my face, tucking it behind my ear. “I want us to both be as comfortable as possible, and Sally, too. I want us to get accustomed to home. And if that means having some distance between you and the rest of the family, I’ll still be closer than I’ve been in fifty years.”
“Get a room,” said Sally, rolling her eyes.
“We did, you just came with it,” I snapped, and she laughed, and this was all falling together. Soon enough, this would all be over.