Page 40 of Butterfly Effects

“I have no idea,” I said. “I’ve never eaten anything from this dimension, and I doubt you’ll have anything I’d recognize from Earth. Hit me with whatever’s easy.”

“Very well,” he said, and began pulling things out of the cold box, piling them on the counter. “I appreciate how reasonable you’re being about this entire situation.”

“Come again?”

“You are a cuckoo. I had expected substantially more resistance when you were told that we wanted you to help us.”

“Fetch and Carry got me out of custody. I can’t imagine the people who snatched me from my home were planning anything good for me.”

He began mixing things into a bowl, making a sort of salad. “You were to be held in the dampening chamber until they had finished gathering the evidence against you. Our law requires you be given a trial. It doesn’t require that you be allowed any defense, or that you be permitted to open your mind to display memories which might prejudice the viewing gallery against the judiciary.”

“So a show trial, in other words.”

“Yes. The punishment for the crime of being a cuckoo queen is death. It has never arisen before, but it was set many generations ago, to be prepared for precisely this situation. By setting the punishment long before the commission of the crime, we can avoid the appearance of bias.”

“I thought you couldn’t harm a queen.”

“I can’t. Fetch and Carry can’t. If we were to try, our minds would turn against our bodies, and the resulting conflict could be fatal. The other queens are not so limited.”

I opened my mouth, then paused, huffing out the air through pursed lips. “So you can’t kill me, but the people who should understand where I’m coming from can?”

“Yes,” he replied, calmly. “You are a threat to their power. No queen can be uncontrolled. They needed to retain the power to destroy what threatens the collective. No one is saying you are a particularly terrible queen, only that all cuckoo queens are forbidden. The punishment for murder, which you are also charged with, on a scale which is frankly impressive, is revision. Either punishment could be applied to you.”

“What is revision, exactly?”

He poured one of the liquids onto the bowl of greens, chunked vegetation, and meat he had been preparing, then carried it over and set it on the counter in front of me, along with a small three-tined fork made of polished wood. “You should be aware, as you have performed the process.”

I blinked. “I have done no such thing.”

“But you have. Our researchers have been traveling along your path. They found evidence of your having removed foundation memories from your allies on Pteracercus, of revising the reality experienced by a native of the same world, and of fully erasing and rebuilding the individual you refer to as ‘Arthur Price.’”

I bristled, food forgotten as I glared at him. “Don’t say Artie’s name. This doesn’t involve him.”

“Oh, but it does. He is evidence of what you’ve done—perhaps the best evidence we could ask for. He will be a key part in your trial.”

“What?”

“If you cannot be found before the trial arrives, I believe they may try him in your stead.”

“They can’t—they can’t do that! He’s not even here!”

Annalist looked at me, radiating bemusement. “Oh, but he is. He was collected shortly after you were. He’ll stand trial, one way or another.”

Eleven

ANTIMONY

“Oh, Kevin, look at her. She’s beautiful. And I can already tell she’s going to be so much wonderful trouble.”

—Evelyn Baker

Crashing through the forest on a dimension populated by asshole telepaths and weird luck-benders. So, you know, business as usual.

WE RAN THROUGH THE JUNGLE, and the jungle did not do a damn thing to make this easier. It wasn’t like fleeing in a fantasy novel, where the trees will conveniently get out of your way and the only puddles will be plot-relevant. The ground was a mixture of slippery leaf litter and unexpected, sucking mud; insects moved through both, some of them large enough to be truly unnerving.

“Have these people never even heard of the square-cube law?” demanded Sam, wrapping his tail around my waist and jerking me out of the path of an eight-foot centipede with razored mandibles that snapped shut on the spot where I’d been running only seconds before.

“I think they rescinded it,” I snapped, sweeping dangling vines aside with hard swipes of my hands, which were superheated to the point where even I could feel the convection. It baked off my skin, turning the air wavery, and when I touched the vines, they charred and blackened. So did the hanging bristle worms that had been hiding among them. Big difference: the worms were large enough to scream as they died, thin, whistling shrieks that sounded like teakettles, if teakettles could feel pain.