Page 18 of Backpacking through Bedlam

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.”