"Do you play on Alsantia?"
It seemed an odd question even to Emory, and he was paid more for his discretion than his competence. In his forty minutes as Ivanu's chauffeur, her playful and cruel inattention to him was soon matched by her guest's self-absorption, a snakedance of wide-eyed egotism that not only put him in the backdrop, but made of him a trusted appliance, if one that would draw an immense paycheck not to pay attention.
As he cut Ivanu's tater tots into medallions, then quartered these slivers, he could not help wondering how the bizarre offworlder would answer.
While she presented as human in the food court, and you would have to be right behind her to see the fluffy poke of her tail from the pink denim he had watched sprout in the fade of her fur, having watched her transformation from fox to woman, no mere compensation would stop his eyes from flicking to that monstrous attribute. While he despised the interloper for mauling his friend, this shapeless, amorphous hatred had already forgotten not only her world but her name..
"You humans have a different sense of that word."
"Play? How do you mean?" As Ivanu speared her tot wedges one at a time, raising the plastic spork for each dainty nibble, she seemed to take more delight in plying the spork than the fast food.
"Humans see it as recreation, usually shared with others, and often reserved for special places.
For animals, 'play' not only has overtones of cruelty, domination, and even violence, it is an intensely personal activity that we indulge in everywhere." When she yawned so wide that it showed all of her teeth, Emory could not help superimposing the fur and yellow teeth of the fox over the woman who had taken her place. In the pause of their conversation, Emory felt deeply that he should know whether the woman or the fox was real.
Emory tilted his chauffeur's cap over his eyes and slouched in the corner of the booth. While neither woman spared him a glance, he felt scoured by their ferocious personalities. When the slightly stale, greasy tater tots had triggered an immense craving, it was just as quickly snuffed by the strong chemical scent in the lining of his brand new chauffeur's cap, and he settled into his pretensions toward invisibility, dreading the moment Ivanu would recall him to duty.
Not that anyone in the mall made more than what Ivanu paid her guards, and on the drive over, in an offhanded remark, she had doubled that salary. Until he fell out of Ivanu's favor, he could no doubt buy into any of these franchises.
Ivanu tittered. "I'm surprised to hear you elevate us. Humans are not so different. I'm playing with my food even now."
"Who said I lifted up humans?" The feral woman's tail twitched as her nose wrinkled atop a lopsided, sarcastic smile. "While I admit to being fasciated by your endless posturing, which lives larger than you do, inflating the material world with skyscrapers, bridges, and sporting arenas, your personal drives and desires are weak tea."
"Now I'm intrigued. Foxes drink tea?"
"I lived for ten years on Earth."
"A shadow among shadows," said Ivanu. "Fascinating. Where?"
"Draden."
"We have a branch laboratory there."
"I've been there."
"To use our gate?"
The fox-woman narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms, as if considering the efficacy of lying. "Yes."
"How did you know it was there?"
"While I wouldn't call myself a magician, I dabble, and more or less sniffed it out by my arcane aptitude."
"You can scratch it out now," said Ivanu. "We've closed that branch."
"That's incovenient." Despite the fox-woman's kind smile, her words were bitten off succinctly, revealing her frustration with this revelation.
"That was where we did most of our shuffling, you see, and that stage of our project is over."
"Shuffling?"
"Think of it like channel surfing. Do you watch TV?"
"When I lived here. More than I wanted."
"I hear you. It's so addictive, isn't it? They call it a new golden age of television, even though there's twice as many awful, revolting shows for each one worth watching." Ivanu's smug manner seemed to indicate she savored the awful, revolting shows more than the ones in good taste.
"Don't take this the wrong way—actually, I don't care how you take me. I haven't eaten a proper meal or slept more than two hours in days. I'm not interested in your TV habits."
"I didn't really want to." Ivanu talked blithely and carefree, as if she hadn't been scratched by the tailed woman. "When we lost track of Alsantia—it turns out that it's very easy to misplace a single world when you're surfing through such a great variety of realities—they were so diligent in pinning it down that I couldn't help but admire those plucky science nerds." She barely paused to swallow her dainty pecks of tater tot. "But there's no denying that discovery ended their usefulness, and there is little I dislike more than an unnecessary expense."
While the fox-woman turned her head to stifle her laughter, it was no use, for teenagers are strange creatures that hear the sarcastic trot of a text clicking on a screen and know its prey; even a genius teenager who shuffles many worlds, like Ivanu, cannot hear derision and scorn without shuffling their self-consciousness. Where Ivanu's facade of indifference cracked, a sweaty, teenage rage flashed. As Emory stared under the bill of his chauffeur's cap, Ivanu's face flickered, convulsing with rage, before subsiding into its mask of apathy.
"Why do you laugh, Vieno?"
"No reason." Unable to stifle her mirth, the fox-woman howled in a way that caused everyone to turn and stare, many mid-chew. Her bestial cackle belonged in a werewolf movie. "Please continue."
"Tell me." Ivanu's face set rigidly.
"Until that moment, you were a believable villain, if a comic book villain. No, I don't read comic books, but I have watched comic book movies. You were acting stridently at some points, and eccentric in others—the tater tots were a nice touch—but now you're only a bean counter."
"A bean counter?"
"The cost, you said."
As silence stretched on, Emory stifled the yawn threatening to fill it.
On finishing her snack, Ivanu wiped her mouth daintily and folded her hands on her lap. "When we realized the ephemerality of existence, that our world was no less a mirage or a shadow than the others, we sought out the prime world."
"That's an arrogant assumption," snapped Vieno. "It would have been more arrogant to think Earth the prime world, but how do you know there is a prime world?"
"By axiom. Having established the prime world's prerequisites, we looked for matches as we sorted through the infinite parallels. When Alsantia nearly fit our criteria, but also seemed a reflection of something near, we deduced Havala by a kind of triangulation between parallel worlds, and found, in the foreshaortened parallax between them, the closest approximation to our theories of the prime. We pored over that world closely, looking for blemishes, inconsistencies, or anything to show it was either an artifact created by a long gone power or yet another shadow cast by the true world."
"Are your instruments infallible?" This was a shrewd question that Emory would not have thought to ask, and he had a master's degree in philosophy—something he had not listed on the resume he had forwarded to Max Milano.
With a contemptuous sweep of her hand, Ivanu said, "While our instruments are a first generation technology, and may be capable of refinement down the line, we concluded Havala was not only real, it was true—these ham-handed brush faces were the actual people, living on the real world, and if we were among their closest neighbors, we could claim no primacy, being ourselves only glimmers split off from them, along with googolplexes of other inklings splintered into an infinitude of semblances, each a hair different, until the spawn of the furthest worlds would be more like the shadow in a dark corner than the reflection of a looking glass."
While Emory was a trained killer able to murder as easily with a toothbrush as with a machete, he had, in youth, taken Oscar Wilde's dictum to heart, that one should be well-dressed and overeducated. But while he knew all the words coming out of Ivanu's mouth, they may as well have been a scattered jumble of dice. Whatever sliver of understanding he extracted raised the hackles on his spine in an overwhelming surge of fearful disbelief. Having grudgingly accepted the existence of two parallel worlds from seeing them with his own eyes, surely there were not more than three? How could they all fit? Was it like an overstuffed bookshelf?
What came next from Ivanu's mouth, in a tone of utter indifference and complacency, froze Emory so solid that for much of her monologue, his elbows and knees seemed brittle ice that might creak and shatter if he was touched in just the right way.
"You can imagine what we thought. Far from being curious of our remotest, most dissimilar kin in the far reaches of possibility, we became fixated on our 'parallel world first cousins,' judging the Havalans a corrupt, morally bankrupt people with little sense for classical beauty, and less appreciation for the refinements of science."
"They were too much like you," purred Vieno.
Ivanu ignored the fox woman. "How could those repugnant monsters live on the prime world?"
"How bad could they be." As she shrugged, her tail twitched.
"They were more vulgar than wicked," sighed the teenager, "which is not to say that their crude science was not powerful in its way. Population control was so absolute that the Havalans were neutered at birth, and offspring advertised in the media, ordered online and engineered, much like our smartphones, even arriving with a baseline programming installed subliminally. Narcotics were sold in vending machines. Violent criminals were distilled into vitamins, minerals, and bottled water. Our fascination with this prime world was soon overshadowed by our loathing for its brutes, and we soon laid our plans."
"And if they had been perfect angels?" sneered Vieno.
"I've wondered that myself."
"Speculation is hypocritical," yawned the fox-woman, showing an amazing amount of teeth despite her human skin, "one should always dive in and do something."
"Have you never known resolve?"
"If by resolve you mean naked will, my shameless thoughts are always streaking into action."
"Then you know that we always would have done what we set out to do."
"What was that?"
"Destroy them, of course."
"Destroy a world?" The fox-woman scoffed, but Emory shuddered, having seen assorted enigmas in Max Milano's laboratories.
"There is nothing easier," sniffed Ivanu, nibbling another quarter-medallion tater tot.
"Whatever happens on Havala ripples in all the worlds. A Havalan volcano is felt as an earthquake on Earth and Alsantia, and as tremors on distant worlds."
"How? If each parallel world lies in its own infinite space, they share neither borders nor congruity. Can there be cause and effect without connection?"
"True, it is illogical to imply an event on Havala causes an event on Earth, or has any reciprocal effect. Despite that gross error, there exists a real synchronization of events, so that while any cause is necessarily fallacious, the close and immediate parallels are so inevitable that they could be ruled on a timetable. In fact, the inescapable parallels are so certain that they seem bound by something stronger than cause and effect. As if everything is not only scripted on some level, but a mistranslation of the primal script. Trust me, despite the evidence of my eyes"--here she gestured with her upturned hand to the fox-woman's tail--"I am no believer in sympathetic magic. Even a skeptic like Max did not rule out cosmic predestination when he saw common events spread out on multiple worlds."
"So there are parallel events. So what?"
"Remember the old laboratory?"
"We were just talking about it."
"Rather than selling it, we lit it up. Not only to collect the insurance money, but to observe, through our remote viewers, any parallel effects on Havala and Alsantia. On Alsantia, a tiny fire in the Sargan Vos, was soon swept up in waves of mulch, but on Havala, an exploding gas main demolished a city block."
"What did you do?" The fox-woman's voice was hushed, though no one in the food court was listening. Except Emory, who felt himself shrink as his realization grew. If Ivanu treated him like a minion, she was as justified as a dragon looking down its snout at a goblin. While he had murdered hundreds, she had exterminated billions. "How did you do it?"
"Having failed the first three times to create a sudden explosion, our fourth attempt succeeded in igniting a chain reaction on Havala through a correspondingly small, "trigger event" on Earth."
The fox-woman roared a laugh that split the food court and caused heads to turn. "How petty."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Their universe still stands, you know. You only destroyed their world, and only to make a little headroom for your prejudices. Maybe the destruction of Havala alarmed a worse world a few light years away?"
"That's hardly science," sniffed Ivanu. "That's science fantasy."
"And you're psychotic," snipped the fox-woman.
"Vieno—can I call you Vieno?"
The fox-woman's eyes flicked in every direction, as if checking the exits. "Call me a cab. Unless your chauffeur can take me."
"Where on Earth to, Vieno dear?"
"Preferrably nowhere on Earth, 'dear.'" Vieno hissed the endearment acerbically and sarcastically. "Certainly nowhere I would want you to have the forwarding address."
"Don't you want to know the how of it before you go?"
"Why? I'm no scientist. Don't think because we're having a catty conversation that I understand you, just as you could take notes on my spells, but never think of attempting any. I wouldn't even believe in science if its eldritch works weren't all about me. Even when I must believe, you could only call my forced agreement bad faith, and I reserve the bedrock of my belief for the magic of Alsantia."
"Bad faith," mused Ivanu. "How interesting. Emory, you earned a master's in philosophy. Care to comment?"
"Ma'am?" Like a rubber band snapped nearly past the point of elasticity, the rangy hired gun sprang from full slouch to parade rest.
"You heard me. I know you're listening. I've watched too many closed circuit videos not to know when my guards fake a nap."
"Pardon me, ma'am," said Emory. "I thought to make myself as unobtrusive as possible. The proverbial mouse, if you will." Since she knew of his graduate studies, he dropped his impassive facade, and allowed the big words, marshalled in block quotes from Kierkegaard, Sartre and Nietzche, to slip from his slightly tense smile. Sweat trickled from his temples through his sideburns.
"I don't hear an answer. And if you call me ma'am again, I'll sweep you into the ashes of Havala."
"It's gone?" Vieno was impressed. It was one thing to plan annihilation, it was another thing entirely to execute Armageddon. "When? I felt nothing. Your observed ripple effect must be subtle indeed."
"Not now." When Ivanu waved her hand to hush the fox-woman, it had the opposite effect, fanning a raging fire in the Alsantian. "Let the philosopher speak."
"Ma'am," croaked Emory, then coughed, then croaked again; although he cleared his throat many times, the croak was unkillable, a cockroach of the vocal chords, which made Emory's own skin crawl as he croaked: "was I promoted based on this criteria?"
"A philosopher should be better trained than a dog or a chauffeur, Emory. Speak. I won't ask again."
"You were talking about bad faith, ma'am. Then you've read Sartre?"
"My reading list wasn't your field of study, Emory."
"Of course. The um, lady, mentioned her reluctance to accept the facts of science as reality, even in our world, where the evidence abounds. To Sartre, belief was a spectrum ranging from consciousness to bad faith; unlike the psychoanalysts, who propagated the idea of an unconscious mind
to explain self-deception, which was like seeking to understand the lie without comprehending the liar. Although she might pretend to a reluctant belief in technology, her verbal subterfuges and clever repartee betray her concealed awareness that it is only bad faith."
"So whether we hide from it, or face it, the truth is in ourselves. I like your pet," purred Vieno.
"That's a pity," said Ivanu. "You mauled his friend."
"Blue stripe?" The fox-woman chuckled. "I never knew his name. What if his pain meant nothing to me?"
"Ma'am? No, not you, Ivanu. Ma'am, are you addressing me?"
"Certainly not her," the fox-woman hissed through her teeth. "We're done talking."
"Really?" Ivanu's eyebrows arched, and she reached in her purse.
As Vieno's hand covered hers, it grew. Fur mingled with its shadow on the food court table, the spilled salt and tot crumbs surreal in the shadow of the half-paw, its claws gingerly tapp ing the back of Ivanu's hand. Aside from the tail, which slithered up behind her like a cobra, the rest of the fox-woman was still—apparently—human.
Emory's eyes darted around the food court. Those whose faces weren't mashed up on burritoes and chicken legs had eyes glued to cell phone screens. In his hesitation, Emory wondered how these eyes hypnotized by screens would seem to someone from a magical world. Despite being a magical creature, the fox-woman's was more rational than Ivanu. So far, Vieno had not said anything she could not back up by force of will, muscle, or magic, as if where she came from, despite the enchantments, there was a lot less nonsense. If he paused in grudging admiration of the Alsantian interloper,
the megalomaniac teenage prodigy was paying his bills, and having allowed his plastic smile to melt,
then harden into a scowl, he slid the spork behind her ear, where the plastic tines tapped the soft skin.
The fox-woman's spine-curdling laugh had a feminine lilt where it trailed off into a growl, but what really shook him was when her eyes seemed to divide in two, as if undergoing mitosis, the twin pupils splitting their attention between Ivanu's purse and Emory's face.
"What are you?" Emory could not mask the tinge of disgust in his voice.
"Not human, thankfully."
"Not a fox, either. Something else."
"You're the first to see through me so completely," she purred. "I'm most definnitely something else. You know that shadow she described? Her offhanded comment was not far from the truth."
"Then you're not Alsantian," murmured Ivanu.
Vieno scoffed. "You're what, sixteen? Considering I lived on Earth nearly as long, I could lay as much claim to being from here. And despite that it's not my birthright, I likewise feel myself to be Alsantian, having lived there for centuries. While your home might be your place of birth, I'm painted on a broader canvas. I haven't even looked in on my birth world for a hundred years, not that the lazy shadows will have changed much." When Vieno clawed Ivanu's hand from her purse, a compact pistol skittered across the table. While her other hand was faster than his, and snatched the weapon first, he covered her tufted paw with his wiry hand. <
"For half a millenia in your years, I was like you, Ivanu. Except whereas you only back Max's sick little project, I headed a vast enterprise exploring the infinitude of worlds. When I became aware of how...incongruent...my world was, compared to the beauty of the Prime Worlds, and I myself to the colorful forms of Earth, Havala, and Alsantia, I also became consumed by apocalyptic envy, satanic narcissism, and catastrophic vandalism—that I, a superior intellect, should arise on a world so remote from true reality, and in a form so obscured and unsightly compared to your beautiful bodies—it drove me mad."
"But I couldn't flip the switch that would have annihilated your worlds. Instead, I bolluxed our apparatus, burned the blueprints, and shredded the notes, then slipped through to Alsantia, which then was the most innocent and idyllic of worlds. In lurking near wizards' cauldrons and libraries, I mastered the formulae for diverse shapes, and whispered the first one I heard to take this new body. And so I became a fox."
"That's insane," grunted Emory, struggling with the surprising strength of the fox-woman. "How long since you've looked at yourself in the mirror?"
"If I scream just so—" Vieno shrieked so delicately that even the most gluttonous eaters, their hands greasy from cheese, burger wrappers, pepperoni, or french fries, turned in alarm. "—you'll be looking at a mug shot, Emory. Situations, surroundings, and especially people: all these things are not only changeable, they change us. It's as exact as chemistry. I'm different here and now than I am with my daughter." Two hulking but uncertain men wobbled to their feet and ambled over towards their table. "I'll bet you're different behind the wheel of a limo than a rifle sight. And the two of you infuse me with such clean and pure hatred that I feel capable of anything. I should feel grateful for this transformation."
"It's an interesting story," said Ivanu. "But that's all it is, a story"
"Every bit of it true. Lies do sell better, though, like the lies I'll tell those gentlemen and the peace officers summoned by their cell phones."
"I think if Emory knocked you out," she stressed, "you'd snap back to a fox, not this shadow-thing you've conjured up like a ghost from a campfire story."
"Normal and everyday aren't true."
"But they are very real, which suits the rest of us just fine."
As Ivanu poured her scathing glance upon him, Emory realized that he had missed his cue, and struck fast and hard.
"What are you..." One of the heavyset gentlemen, an aging, coarsely grey man pocked with age spots, took a step back and shouted, "what is that?"
"Don't you know a fox when you see one? Call animal control."
"A fox?"
When the gray man's stony eyes melted into a rubbery imbecility, Emory hoisted up the limp fox and shoved it towards his nerveless hands. "Weren't you coming to help?"
"Don't touch that," the old man stammered, "you might get rabies. Or worse."
"I'm not sure what's worse than rabies," said Ivanu. "But we'll be very careful. Come along, Emory. You had better bring it with you."
Emory trailed her to the mall doors, where Ivanu turned, tapped her toe, and looked at him archly. "As it's smaller than a beagle, I should hope you don't expect me to get the door?"
With only a little trouble, Emory shouldered the fox, then opened the mall door. As Ivanu brushed past, she stamped on his foot, lingering there to rub the fox's fur.
"Maybe a hat?" Both eyebrows arched over her curious stare, and her smile drooped a bit at both ends. When she leaned in, lips slightly parted, her ketchup breath warmed his neck, her high heel bit deep, and Emory grimaced as he turned his head. As if stung, she stepped back—mercifully, off his foot and screaming big toe— and he breathed a sigh of relief. "While I'm not so vain as to think myself perfect, I have yet to meet anyone better. What's with you, Emory?"
"With me? What do you mean, Ma—Ivanu?"
"You're anything but innocent, Emory. I've read your file." When he said nothing, and took a step toward the parking lot, she clasped his arm. While her hands were not small, and her knuckles were white, her fingers barely cupped his hugely developed biceps, and he only felt a tiny pinch where his triceps began.
"Excuse me, Ma—Ivanu. Forgive me, I keep forgetting. Hadn't I better get her in the car?"
"Oh, I see." While Emory hadn't thought she could arch her eyebrows any higher, they seemed to disappear in a cartoon-like zenith. "I'm not your type."
When the infuriating—world-destroying, he reminded himself—teenager gave a meaningful look to the crumpled fox, and drew back her fingers, as if from a fur stole she had dirtied, he said, "Not only are you my employer, Ivanu...but yes, I prefer a partner who is a bit older, and of a different... persuasion."
Ivanu snickered and turned her head. If her cheeks had reddened, and one eye glistened, Enory was not deceived; she was anything but sorrowful, and that was a tear of frustration, so frustrated it couldn't even fall, as if trapped behind a sheet of ice. "I won't have you seating it before me."
"Of course, Ivanu." Emory hastened his step to the limo, opened the passenger door, and waited for Ivanu. After she took her seat, he fidgeted under his armload of fox, and made a pussyfooting gesture toward the car, and she said, "not on my life, and certainly not on my seats. Put it in the trunk."
Having opened the trunk, Emory cursed under his breath. It was not that the previous driver had allowed the trunk to become a jumble,but the free hand of his employer, and the concealment the trunk door provided for his groaning sigh. The pay was too good to leave just now, however much he would like to toss Ivanu's body atop the fox. Before he closed the trunk, he stared contemptuously at the beast, resenting its every breath. Its eyelids batted as it snuffled and snorted, then snored so loudly, he did a double take. Was it staring through those half-lidded eyes? No, it was dreaming. No, that wasn't quite true. A shadow creature living in a shadow world was only dreaming that it saw anything, and right now it dreamed that it was dreaming.
If the world had come to nothing under his watch, he couldn't do anything about it now. The pay was too good. Still, the thought was maddening. If Earth was only a shadow cast by another world, and this true world had been destroyed, could anything he did matter?
"What are you waiting for? Driver!"
This was no careless slip, but a slap into anonymity, Emory realized. While an intellectual giant and a mad scientist, Ivanu was a teenager at heart, and as he had not rejected the supervillain in her, but the teenager, she would be slow to forgive, and ply him with spite and petty revenge until she had truly forgotten his name. While he had not chased girls, Emory had been in high school, and he knew the type. He had even taken the type to prom when asked, played the perfect gentleman, and tried to enjoy being an insider, however much he preferred being an outsider, in fear of the uberpopular blonde who had wrecked her exes to the point of turning them inside-out, so that no one, not even the teachers, wanted anything to do with these inside-outers. But, Emory realized glumly, Earth had turned out to be an inside-out world. The insider world was a dimension away and pulverized into atoms, and the cool outsider world, Alsantia, was a few shades away from joining it.
"Driver!"
"Coming Iva—Ma'am." She did not correct him this time. He closed the trunk on the snoring shadow.