So she looks up at the rearview mirror, where a thin, barely visible white tendril wafts about. “Hey,” she says. “Can you come here? I need to talk.”
For a moment nothing happens. Then, abruptly, the rearview mirror changes. One second, it features a stunning view of the Houlihan driveway. In the next, it opens onto a vast space. She can’t see it well—only a hard gray-white floor, which is so stark with shadows that it feels like there’s a spotlight somewhere, just out of view. She can’t see what’s making the shadows, but then one of them shifts, and a moment later the Woman in White sits up from somewhere below the rearview mirror. She’s different again, Aislyn notes. Still white, but this time there is a hint of epicanthic fold about her eyes, and exotic angles to her cheekbones and the spacing of her nose. Russian, maybe? Her brows are white. Her hair—Aislyn blinks.
“Lyn, my person-shaped friend! I figured out why you were angry with me last night. What a bad boy that minion was. And how foolish, to get grabby with a city! You could have smushed him.”
Aislyn nods absently. “Are you bald?”
“Am I—” The Woman pauses. Abruptly, lush tawny-white hair tumbles around her face, nearly crowding her features out of the mirror. One lock falls artfully over an eye. “No, I am not bald.”
“Ohhhhh-kaaaaay.” Then Aislyn frowns, remembering that she is supposed to be mad at the Woman, after all. Despite Conall’s subdued manner, Aislyn’s father had been delighted with him that morning, slapping the younger man on the back and calling him “son.” Apparently the current story is that somebody came into the backyard, and Conall fended the intruder off despite having drunk too much to remember the intruder’s face. A real hero, in Matthew Houlihan’s eyes. “So you know what Conall did.”
“Yes, that one.” The Woman smiles brightly. “You should know that the guide-lines—the things you keep calling flowers?—don’t control people, not precisely. They just… guide. Encourage preexisting inclinations, and channel the energies from same into more compatible wavelengths.”
What Aislyn gleans from this gobbledygook is that Conall got grabby because Conall is a grabby bastard to begin with, who might have attacked Aislyn whether he had a flower growing from his neck or not. But that, and the explanation, does not console her. “Why are you putting anything in people?” she asks. “I didn’t think it meant much at the ferry station. Now, though…”
It is indisputable that the flower fronds, or guide-lines or whatever they’re called, have a purpose. That this purpose is something other than control makes it no less unnerving. What does happen, then, when the guide-lines get inside a person? Aislyn has a sudden memory of watching a nature show on a slow day, about parasites. One episode had been all about a fungus that grew inside ants as a kind of webwork throughout their bodies, eating them as it grew, and controlling their behavior. Then once all the juicy bits of the ant were gone, the fungus popped out of their heads in order to release its spores.
From the back of the head, Aislyn remembers, incidentally. What would be the nape of the neck on a person.
In the mirror, the Woman in White leans closer, narrowing her eyes. “Hmm, you’re getting the wrong idea, I can tell,” she says. “It’s not, uh, whatever you’re thinking. Let me explain. But this is awkward. Hold on a moment, I’ll come to you.”
Something shoots from the mirror, past Aislyn’s face and into the back seat. Aislyn catches her breath and jerks away in pure reflex, but she doesn’t quite have time to register what she’s seeing as something frightening. As far as she can tell, it’s just a long, thick tongue of featureless white substance, which skeets through the mirror frame as if it isn’t glass, but the opening of some kind of tube or delivery chute. What she sees when she turns is not a puddle of goo, as she is half expecting, but feet. White, featureless boots, attached to nothing, although the bottoms of the boots are beginning to develop texture and color. Then something pixels up from these to form legs, primly crossed at the ankle. Then hips, a waist, all of it achieving realistic definition only belatedly—and finally the Woman in White sits there, beaming, with a little clutch purse in her lap.
There is an instant in which Aislyn’s mind tries to signal an alarm, doom, existential threat, all the usual fight-or-flight signals that are the job of the lizard brain. And if the gush of substance had been different somehow—something hideous, maybe—she would have started screaming.
Three things stop her. The first and most atavistic is that everything in her life has programmed her to associate evil with specific, easily definable things. Dark skin. Ugly people with scars or eye patches or wheelchairs. Men. The Woman in White is the visual opposite of everything Aislyn has been taught to fear, and so… even though intellectually Aislyn now has proof that what she’s been seeing is just a guise, and the Woman in White’s true form could be anyone or anything…
… Aislyn also thinks, Well, she looks all right.
The second thing that stops her is the latent, not-quite-acknowledged realization that the Woman is dangerous. What will happen if she screams? Her father will come running to defend what’s his, and Aislyn is fairly certain that the Woman cannot be harmed by any ordinary human being. And then will the Woman put one of those parasite-flowers into him? He is already a man inclined toward violence and control. Will he become worse? She will do nearly anything to avoid this possibility.
The third, and possibly most powerful of the things that stop her, is that she is agonizingly lonely, and the Woman has begun to feel something very like a friend.
So Aislyn does not scream.
“Now, you just drive to work,” the Woman in White says, reaching forward to pat Aislyn’s shoulder. Again there is a fleeting ghost of a sensation, like a sting that is short-circuited on its way to causing pain. Aislyn flinches now, realizing what that sting means—but there is no white tendril on her shoulder when the Woman takes her hand away. The Woman sighs a little. Aislyn lets out a shaky breath.
(She does not parse the Woman’s sigh as disappointment. She does not parse her own sigh as relief. The alternative is to challenge her own belief that the Woman in White isn’t so bad. This would force her to question her own judgment and biases and find them wanting. And given how hard she has fought lately to feel some kind of belief in herself, she is not ready to doubt again. So it’s fine. Everything is fine.)
Focusing on what matters, Aislyn jabs a finger at the huge white towerlike thing in her front yard. “What is that?”
“Mmm, think of it as an adapter cable,” says the Woman in White. “You know what those are, don’t you?”
“Yes. But that’s not a cable.”
“Of course it is. It’s just a very big adapter cable.”
Aislyn shakes her head. She’s going to lose it in a minute. “Okay. Fine. What’s it adapting, then?”
“Weeeeelllll, an adapter usually connects one way of doing a thing to a different way of doing a thing, right?” The Woman shrugs. “You want to listen to music. You have speakers designed to work with one kind of music-maker, but all of your music is on a different kind of music-maker. Yes? Irritating and inefficient. There’s a simple fix for the problem, however.” She gestures at the white tower.