Page 98 of Tidal Creatures

Judy nods and hands him the key. He takes a deep breath, Máni stepping up to take control of the moment, and as the air around him gleams with moonlight and frost, he taps the wall.

As before, no gate appears. Also as before, Artemis steps forward to repeat the gesture, and the gate blooms into being.

The pattern is different this time, less like calligraphy and more like rime blooming on frozen leaves. There are distinctions in the divinity behind the gods that unlock the gate. They’re not normally this clear, because they’re not normally opening in such quick succession, and not for the first time, Judy wishes she’d looked more closely at the gate Máni went through when he found Aske dead on the other side. Maybe then she would have known even before he came back that he was walking into someone else’s space.

Máni steps through into the everything. Judy turns, and Chang’e offers her hand to Dodger.

“We need you to come with us again,” she says.

Dodger reluctantly lets go of Roger, her hand lingering on his wrist, as if she’s afraid to even break contact. Roger bumps her side with his elbow.

“It’s okay,” he says. “You came back, and everything re-entangled immediately. This isn’t going to hurt us; it’s just going to let us do what we came all the way down here to do.”

“All right,” she says, and takes Chang’e’s hand, letting herself be pulled into the everything.

After that, all they can do is wait.

Mare Parvum

TIMELINE: AUGUST 18, 2017. THREE DAYS TO THE ECLIPSE.

The everything is black lit with rainbows. Everywhere Dodger looks, she sees the flash and flare of dying possibilities. It’s like she’s standing at the heart of a living equation, one that might be the equation that controls the universe, the equation she was born to one day encompass and understand, but she doesn’t want to understand it, not yet—she’s not ready. She’s afraid, on a deep, instinctual level, that once she grasps the underpinning mathematics of creation, she won’t be able to be even as human as she is now … and she knows she’s not as human as she used to be.

How could she be? She’s half of a hive mind, and while she and Roger have taken complicated, sometimes painful measures to retain their individuality, she’s slipping. Sometimes she loses track of which body is hers, at least for short periods, and they’ve been getting longer. Pretty soon, she thinks they’ll spend their days ping-ponging back and forth, trading ownership of material shells without concern for who owned which one first.

She doesn’t actually want that. Neither does he. They grew up thinking they were people with surprisingly solid imaginary friends, and they changed the universe so they could stay together, and staying together without merging into one means fighting to stay at least a little bit apart.

The equation that surrounds her, holding her up and beckoning her on at the same time, could either smash the last of the carriers between them and make them one person in two bodies rather than two people desperately trying to stay as separate as they can, or it could give her the tools no one was able to build for her and allow them to go back to the way things were before they manifested, without letting the Doctrine go.

This equation is the answer to everything, and to understand it is to be transformed in some way she can’t know or define. She’ll have to solve it eventually: it’s what she was made to do. She wants to start working so badly that it’s a sweet, metallic taste in her mouth, a burning tang like the aftermath of eating raw pineapple, and she never wants it at all. The combination of temptation and revulsion is hard to push aside. She tries to focus on the individual rainbow flashes instead, shutting out the silence in her head.

They’re beautiful, and dizzying, and she never wants them to stop.

“Dodger? We good?” asks Chang’e. “This should be Máni’s everything. Does it feel any different to you than the last one?”

Dodger blinks, shaking off her fugue, and looks toward the moon goddess. “I … Hang on.” She looks at the rainbow flashes again, scanning them for something she doesn’t have the words to explain to anyone outside herself. After a moment, she nods. “The underpinning geometry of the space is different. We’re not standing inside the same piece of the equation. This isn’t your space.”

“Oooh-kay,” says Chang’e. “So let’s get moving.”

Máni nods and starts to walk, and the others follow him as he treks through the everything. Dodger watches their surroundings intently, taking note of all the things her companions can’t see. Chang’e described the everything as a rainbow path through nothingness, but Dodger knows that isn’t so. They’re surrounded by so much creation that the name of the space makes perfect sense, and it’s not just a path; there are corridors branching off on either side, leading away from the route they’re taking. She doesn’t mention them, and neither do the Lunars; she’s not entirely sure the Lunars know.

It seems odd that they would use this space so consistently for such a long time and not know everything about the way it works. But when she blinks away the overlay of helpful figures that defines the space for her, forcing herself to see it as they do, it’s more understandable: the rainbow flashes define the “walls,” and it’s easy to interpret them as linear things. There are no visible turns or doorways.

If she wasn’t essentially the woodcutter’s daughter who leaves her own trail of stones through the forest, she would be much more anxious about the idea of leaving the known safety of the path to the window.

Maybe they’ll bring her back here when all this is done and settled, and together they can find out what’s down those pathways into the rainbow dark. She’d really like to know.

For the moment, a window has appeared ahead of them, affixed to the wall when she looks at the everything the way she naturally wants to, at the equations and geometry of it all, and hanging unsupported in the air when she looks at it with only her eyes. This whole place is an optical illusion writ large, and it hurts her head to think about it too hard.

They approach the window, which has a hardwood frame and cotton curtains with a dinosaurs-and-rockets print. Máni’s cheeks flush red, the color deepening his dark skin, and says, “I never thought about how juvenile my window is before. It’s not like I can change the curtains, though.”

“It’s fine,” says Chang’e, reassuringly. They approach the window, Máni first, Dodger close behind. She’s the one who needs to chart their planned course, after all; she needs to see.

And on some level, she’s hungry for another glimpse of the City she saw from Chang’e’s window. It’s as beautiful and strange and contradictory as the everything, with tall spires piercing the sky and streets paved in nacreous mother-of-pearl that gleams and shifts, as changing as the surface of a soap bubble. People move on those streets, alongside the occasional horse-drawn carriage; there are no cars. Indeed, she sees no signs of technological advancement beyond what’s described in Baker’s books, which stopped at the level common in the early 1900s.

She wants a closer look. She never wants a closer look. She’s reasonably sure that looking too closely would mean forgetting how to look at anything else, ever, and even as she hangs back to let Máni unlatch his window and push it open, she loves and fears the City in equal measure.

The air that flows through the open window is entirely unpolluted by the modern era. Woodsmoke smudges its composition, but trees have always burned, all the way back to the beginning of time; the presence of a few bonfires doesn’t imply an industrial revolution. She breathes in deeply, and tries to ignore the way the equations around them sharpen, coming into clearer focus as she comes closer to the City.