“Eh, if it wasn’t on Star Trek, I don’t know.” Though Bronca does have a vague memory of a weird episode about a mirrored universe where everyone was evil, somehow signified by men wearing goatees? And in this universe they wear manbuns. Whatever.
“I’m going to tell you a creation story,” Bronca says. “It’s not like the ones my people tell. Not even like the ones your people tell. The one I’m about to tell you is…” She considers, then laughs as she thinks of a term. “More like a unified field theory of creation. So try to follow along.
“A long time ago, when existence was young, there was just one world that was full of life. No one can say if it was bad or good. It was life.” She shrugs.
The river beside them runs through other planes where other Broncas speak—a thousand other tellers telling a thousand other tales, beneath ten thousand different skies. If Bronca concentrates, she can see them, skies where a second sun has risen or the night air is purple and gold and burns with what would be toxic to her. She tries not to see them, however. Veneza deserves her full attention for now… and it’s dangerous even to look at some things. The city has warned her about this.
“That first world, that first life, was a miraculous thing. But each decision those living beings made fissioned off a new world—one where some of them turned left, and another where some turned right. Then each of those worlds fissioned off more worlds of their own, and so on, and so on. How do you top a miracle? You don’t; you just make another universe, which will start making its own miracles. And so life proliferated—across a thousand million universes, each one stranger than the last.”
Bronca repositions her hands, one flattened in the air a few inches above the other. Then she ladders them, one above the other, to suggest many layers. A mille-feuille of worlds, she means to suggest, each building on the other, forming coral columns that rise and split and twist apart and split again. An endlessly growing tree, sprung from a single tiny seed, whose branches are each so wildly different that life on one would be unrecognizable to life on another. With one important exception.
“Cities traverse the layers.” In this world Bronca points at the skyline that rises above the trees of Bridge Park, on their side of the river. “People still tell stories of how terrible the Bronx is. At the same time, somewhere, some realtor is talking up how amazing it is, so that people with money will come and buy up everything. At the same time there are the folks who live here, for whom it’s neither terrible nor amazing; it just is. All of these things are true, and that’s just within our own reality. It’s not just decisions, is what I’m trying to say. It’s… Every legend of this city, every lie, those become new worlds, too. All of them add to the mass that is New York, until finally all of it collapses under its own weight… and becomes something new. Something alive.”
Fuck yeah, says the voice in her head.
Shut up, sweetie, I’m busy, she sings back.
Veneza is turning, looking at the trees and the water and the night-lights as if it’s all new. It is. She says, in a tone of wonder, “Always used to look at the city from the rooftop at home. It always looked like it was breathing.”
“It was. Just a little, then.” Fetuses breathe their own amniotic fluids, consuming themselves as practice for the day when they will metabolize something wholly different. “But today, everything changed. After today, the city’s going to be alive in a way that it wasn’t before.”
“Why today?”
Bronca shrugs. “The stars aligned? The Creator got bored? I don’t know. The timing doesn’t matter; the event does.”
“Yeah, I guess I’m not paying attention to the right things.” Veneza sobers. “That painting today. Tell me about that.”
Yeah. Bronca needs to stop showing off. She sighs and turns away from the rocks, beckoning for Veneza to follow her back toward the Jeep. “Right, the painting. Basically, one of the realities out there is not super jazzed that our reality exists. Fuck if I know why—but whatever the reason, something from that reality tries to kill cities whenever they become alive the way New York has just done. They tried this morning, and did some damage, but failed in the big push.”
Veneza’s eyes widen. “Oh, shit. The Williamsburg!”
“The Williamsburg.” Bronca nods grimly. “Which could’ve been a lot worse; it was going for the whole city, like I said. Something stopped it. Someone like me, another person who is now the city.”
“What, like…” Veneza pauses, frowning. “There’s more people who can make the river move?”
“There are six of us. One for each borough, and another who’s the whole city. That’s the one who stopped the attack this morning. That entity from the other universe”—the Enemy, her mind whispers—“is still here, though. And something’s changed about the way it presents itself. It’s supposed to be a horrible big thing that attacks cities at the moment of their birth. That’s how it’s always happened before—always, across thousands of years. Now, though, its tactics have changed.”
And that’s got Bronca very worried. There is nothing in the lexicon about the Enemy co-opting human minions to deliver monstrous paintings. Are the others having this kind of trouble, too? Maybe she should…
No. No. Beyond preparing Veneza as best Bronca can, she’s staying out of this fight.
“The painting.” Veneza, whose thoughts have obviously followed the same path, shivers visibly. “Stuff in it was… moving.” She trails off, her voice haunted.
“Remember what I said about life from those other places not being something that even looks alive, to us.”
“What, there are actually people who look like two-dimensional paint smears somewhere out there?” Veneza shakes her head. “Fuuuuuck.”
That was what had made the paint-figures so creepy, really. To know that the things she was seeing weren’t just mindless, swirl-faced monsters, but things with minds and feelings? Minds as incomprehensibly alien as Lovecraft once imagined his fellow human beings to be.
They get in the car, and Bronca turns them back toward the expressway, heading for New Jersey. Veneza’s quiet beside her, digesting what she’s said. But there’s one more important bit that Bronca has to get across.
“So.” She takes her eyes off the road just long enough to fix them on Veneza. This part is important. “Remember that thing I did with the river? I did the same thing at the Center today. If I’m careful, if I do things right, I can push those people, the Enemy, back into their world, or at least out of my immediate vicinity. You, though, you can’t do that. So next time you see some fucked-up shit—”
“Come get you. Got it.”
“Uh, well. Yeah, that works, too. But if I’m not around? Book it. Run away, not toward it like you did today. Okay?”
At this, however, Veneza scowls. “If I hadn’t run toward the crazy, and pulled you back when they started reaching for you with all their little…” She waggles her fingers and makes a face. Bronca frowns in surprise. Those things had been reaching for her? “Then you would have been, I don’t know, paint food.”