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.

The Impossible City may be her destiny and inevitable destination. That doesn't make it her master. She moves to take Máni's place at the window, leaning out and scanning the nearby sky.

Stars gleam everywhere, little diamonds against the dark. She takes another deep breath of City air, and the diamonds become tetragons, some square, some rectangular, some with arched or domed tops, but all with four sides, perfect geometric shapes. Windows. Some are open, their owners already on their passage across the sky, and she wonders how the Lunars manage that, how they reconcile time zones and shifting sunsets to form a singular moon. She dismisses the question quickly. It's not her business, not her problem; she's here for the sake of the math, and she doesn't need to worry about the way the Lunars handle their own affairs.

She keeps looking, taking in the exact angles and designs of the windows, until she spots something familiar. She has to lean out much too far to see it, a white wooden frame about six feet to her left.

"There," she says, dropping back to the flats of her feet and stepping back before she can give in to the urge to steal another look at the City below. She indicates the direction in question. "Chang'e's window is over that way. Close enough that I'm pretty sure we could swing there if we anchored the rope right."

"So I can come see you when you're at work," jokes Máni, looking at Chang'e.

Chang'e smiles. "Assuming you feel like playing acrobat with a possible long, long drop, sure," she says. "Dodger, do you think you can estimate the location of Aske's window?"

"Not without the third data point, and it's Artemis's night anyway," says Dodger. "Let's go back to the others."

She's a little afraid to be in the everything with Roger. The two of them together, in this impossibly possible space, feels like it's something that ought to be forbidden. The feedback they set up between themselves may well cross the line into what they feared when they were children, when they hadn't wanted to meet because a single touch could have locked them into one another's heads forever.

But they need to be here. Both of them. She knows that, deep down, in the place where she keeps the equations that modify reality, the ones that somehow steal time from itself and bend causality like a strip of paper.

Máni shuts the window, and the three of them walk back to the gate, Dodger refusing to let herself look at the gaps in the walls that neither of her companions can see, Chang'e walking a little faster than the other two, like she's eager to get back to the underground lab where their friends—if they can be called friends—are waiting.

As they approach the gate, Máni makes a soft sound of protest, signaling a stop. Chang'e turns to look at him, curiosity taking ownership of her face.

"What is it?" she asks.

"Artemis," he says.

"What about her?"

"She lied to us when she got here, and I didn't meet her until after Aske was dead. Did you? Is there a chance that maybe this wasn't the first time Anna's managed to come back up to the surface? Because if Aske wasn't expecting another Lunar to attack her, she wouldn't have been prepared to fight back. Artemis tried so hard to make us not trust Diana…"

"I still don't trust Diana," says Chang'e. "Even if we can't trust Artemis completely, she's right when she says Diana doesn't do nearly as much of the administrative side of managing the local pantheon as she should. Judy's still a student, but Diana is happy to put all the maintenance and busywork on us, and she knows we'll do it—me because I don't want to see the pantheon fall into chaos, Judy because she understands my concerns. This shouldn't ever have been our job." She stops, silence taking a moment to grow heavy in the air between them before she finally says. "I don't trust Diana. I want to—this would be so much easier if we had someone powerful and trustworthy on our side—but I can't. Artemis has had plenty of opportunities to betray us. I think there's a good chance she is what Anna said she is. She's just someone who wound up in the path of the alchemists before she knew how to evade them."

"Sounds about right," says Dodger. "We'll see what we can do for her when this is all over."

"Artemis, or Anna?" asks Máni.

"Artemis," says Dodger. "I'm not sure there's anything that can be done for Anna at this point. Even if we could somehow pull off a miracle and get her a body she didn't have to share with someone she clearly hates, she'd be a hundred years out of the only time period she knows."

"Aren't you in charge of—" begins Máni.

Dodger fixes him with a glare before he can complete his sentence. "Don't even suggest it," she says, in a voice like ice.

"But you said you could control time," he protests.

She stops walking and sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose with her right hand and closing her eyes. "I can reset time," she says. "I can sidestep time, to a degree, just wrap myself up in the seconds dying all around me and disappear, or I can rewind us to any point within my own lifetime and let things restart from there. How much I remember when I do this is… well, it's not the most reliable thing ever. We did it a lot of times to get to this timeline. A lot of times. This is the best of all possible worlds, at least by the standards we have to work from, and I'm not going to risk all of that because you don't understand how the system works."

"We can't understand if you won't tell us," says Chang'e.

"All right, look at it this way." Dodger drops her hand. "You're always the same goddess, right? You have personal continuity, or continuity of personality at the absolute minimum. But you don't carry experiences and memories from manifestation to manifestation. If Judy dies, you'll find a new host, and you'll start clean, with only the things Chang'e knows, and none of the things Judy knew."

Chang'e nods, slowly.

"Seems inefficient to me. You should have a way of storing memories, so people can't just go around slaughtering Lunars the way they have been. Die here, manifest elsewhere with your saved game intact, immediately alert the rest of your pantheon. If I were in charge, that's how we'd do things."

"But then any god who'd incarnated more than once would overwhelm and swamp out their host," protests Máni. "We'd crush them as soon as we woke up."

"So maybe if I were in charge I wouldn't change anything," says Dodger. "Well, the way I manipulate time is sort of like what you're describing. I take us back to a preset time, and the version of me who did the taking ceases to exist. Then, if I do things right in the new timeline, she never gets the chance to exist, because I've bent things in a way that makes her impossible. Say I could go back to when Anna was an innocent little lamb who hadn't fallen into Reed's clutches or fully accepted Artemis yet. Say I could keep either or both of those things from happening. What happens then? Does Reed stay on the alchemical path that leads to my brother and I being created? Is there an Artemis here in Berkeley when we need a moon god who can actually fight? Do any of us exist? All of time is the butterfly effect writ large, and to be honest, I probably can do more than I think I can, but when there's a chance—any chance at all—that pushing my limits could wipe my brother out of reality, I'm sorry. There are risks I don't take."

"I didn't consider any of that," says Chang'e.

"Temporal causality is hard to think about without getting a headache, and most people never need to," says Dodger. She starts walking again, heading for the exit. "Let's go see if our backup has been captured by alchemists or eaten by aufs or something. I want to get this over with."