I felt that Loren needed a little time alone. It was dangerous letting her walk around by herself. But I couldn’t force her to talk to me when she was angry and afraid.

I had to climb many stairs to reach Loren’s room. I still didn’t understand the point of stairs. I guess humans just love anything with straight edges and a rectangular shape. The stairs were definitely rectangular. And they allowed the humans to place a second level in their houses. This made the house a larger rectangle. And I suppose this is important in some way.

Inside Loren’s room was a long rectangle covered with artificial skin. I suspect she used it for sleeping. I had seen that when she slept, she lay flat and stretched out straight. There were two other flat rectangles, one mostly covered with bound papers. The bound papers were called books or magazines. Loren had explained them to me. A sort of extremely primitive computer file.

I opened one of them. There were words printed on the pages but the words stopped abruptly in the middle of the book. Of course. Loren had not finished the book. So she could not recreate it out of her memory.

There was a small picture of Loren with two other people. All were making human smiles. One was her mother. The other I believed was male. Perhaps her father.

I took this picture and held it in my hand. I looked around the room, trying to understand this alien girl. But alien things are hard to make sense of.

By the time I got out of the hollow house and back to the street, Loren was gone from sight. I worried about finding her. But after wandering the alien landscape for a while, I heard a far-off sound. A THWACK!

I ran at top speed to the sound and found Loren in a field of short grass and dirt. She stood with her back to a high wire cage. In her right hand she held a sort of long, shaped stick, wider at the far end. With her left she tossed a round white sphere up in the air. And then, quickly clasping the stick with both hands, she swung the stick till it struck the falling white sphere.

The result was fascinating. The sphere went flying through the air.

Loren watched the sphere until it fell to the grass, perhaps a hundred feet away. Then she reached down into a bucket by her feet, lifted out a second, identical sphere, and repeated the entire process.

<Loren!>

She ignored my approach.

Toss … swing … THWACK!

The sphere flew over the grass and landed at the edge of a narrow band of trees.

Toss … swing … THWACK!

<Loren?>

“See, this is softball,” she said, without looking at me. “See that high spot there? That’s the pitcher’s mound. The pitcher throws the ball across this plate. The batter swings and tries to knock the stitches off her.”

<Off the pitcher?>

Toss … swing … THWACK!

“That was my last ball. I’d better go retrieve them. Our coach goes ape if we lose equipment.”

She started off across the field, still carrying her shaped stick.

<You are upset,> I said.

“What was your first clue?”

<This all seems very bizarre to you. Me as well.>

“Bizarre? My neighborhood with no people in it? My mom sounding like a dimwit robot but knowing things she can’t possibly know? The sky in patches?”

<Is that humor?>

“It’s sarcasm,” she said. We reached one of the white balls. She picked it up and used the stick to knock it back toward the tall wire cage.

I held the small picture out for her to see. <I got this from your room. I thought you might like something personal. I don’t know if we will be able to go back to your house.>

“That is not my house,” she said. But she took the picture and stared at it. Her face seemed to grow softer. Her mouth corners became more nearly level. Her forehead skin grew less wrinkled. “Elfangor, what is happening here?”

<What you said earlier, more or less. I think that in order to direct the Time Matrix you need to form a mental image of where and when you want to go. We couldn’t do that because all three of us were fighting for control. We each — you, me, Visser Thirty-two — had ideas of where to go. You wanted your home. I wanted mine. I guess he wanted his. Nobody’s vision was complete. We were all freezing and suffocating for lack of air. The Time Matrix did the best it could.>

“I thought it was supposed to be a time machine.”

I sighed. <Some people believe that there is not just one universe, but many. Maybe, somehow, instead of traveling through the time and space of our own universe, we forced the Time Matrix to create a whole new universe. When the three of us wrestled for control, the Time Matrix could not make sense of what we were asking it to do. So it created this place.>

Loren resumed walking toward the far edge of the field. She stooped to pick up another ball and knocked it back in the direction we’d come from. “So my mom. My mother … she’s just made up out of my memories.”

<And even then, not all your memories. She is not complete. She is bits and pieces of your memories of her. I think the more complicated things, like sentient creatures, are probably the most likely to be incomplete.>

Loren made a snorting sound. “Great universe, isn’t it?”

<That was sarcasm, too?>

“Yeah. That was sarcasm, too.”

We had reached the trees. Loren plunged in. “Look how complete all the trees are. Why are the grass and the trees and the air all like they should be?”

<Because a person … whether it’s an Andalite or a human, is a thousand times more complicated than a tree.>

I noticed that Loren was not looking at me. Instead she was staring alertly into the woods.

<Do you see something?>

“No. I … I have a feeling, is all. I have to go look.”

I followed her through the woods. We traveled no more than fifty feet when we reached what Loren had sensed.

The trees stopped abruptly. The sky above us stopped, too. The ground and the grass all stopped. Just stopped. And beyond it was blank whiteness.

The pure, blank, white of Zero-space. Nothingness.

I felt awed and frightened all at once. We were standing at the edge of our tiny universe. Loren reached toward the whiteness, stretching her hand out beyond the edge of soil and vegetation, air and sky.

Her arm reached that edge and curved back on itself. It simply bent in a perfect arc, so that her hand was reaching back toward her own face.

“Noooooooo!” she screamed. “No! No! No!”

<Loren, it’s only …> Only what? What could I say to comfort her when I felt my own mind spinning out of control?

She turned to me, eyes wide and reddish now. “I want to go home, Elfangor. I want to go home! This place is wrong. It’s wrong!”

<I know. I feel it, too.>

“We have to get out of here. This place can’t exist. Feel it. It’s wrong!”

<We have to find the Time Matrix,> I said. <It’s the only way. But we don’t know where it is. And Visser Thirty-two will try to stop us.>

She was still holding the shaped stick. The softball stick. She looked at me with cold fury in her blue human eyes. And I saw something there that almost scared me.

She clutched the stick tightly. “Let him try and stop us. Let him try.”