It shouldn’t make sense, but it does. Aislyn shakes her head slowly. “But what, I don’t know, way of doing a thing, could you possibly be adapting with that?”
“My universe to yours.”
“I—” Aislyn stares. Then closes her mouth. She really can’t think of anything else to say to that.
The Woman sighs impatiently and then waves a hand at the steering wheel. “Drive, drive! I don’t want you attracting any more attention by veering from your usual routine. I can’t watch you all the time. That’s why that nasty little São Paulo almost got to you last night.” Then she grins in delight, clapping her hands in just a little too much glee—but it is infectious, her giddy delight. “But you showed him, didn’t you?”
It had felt good to send that awful man tumbling. Just like Conall. São Paulo’s car is gone today, she notes, and there have been no police or emergency vehicles around that morning, so she assumes he got up and drove himself away. With two broken arms? No matter. Aislyn smiles to herself, then turns to the steering wheel and starts up the car. “Yeah. Okay. But if you’re going to ride to work with me, you have to tell me what’s going on.”
“That’s the plan, lovely.” Aislyn pulls out of the driveway as she hears the Woman settling into her back seat. There is an odd moment when the car bumps across the gutter into the street. The whole vehicle seems to dip lower than usual. The struts groan, and she hears something in the car’s undercarriage scrape loudly against asphalt. The Woman in White mutters something like “Damned gravity, always forget the exact ratio,” and then the car rises back to its usual height and pulls away with no more difficulty.
“The adapters are possibility,” the Woman says as Aislyn drives. Aislyn tries to look at her in the rearview because it’s polite to meet another person’s eyes during a conversation, but the Woman isn’t sitting in that area of the back seat. “A just-in-case. And I have no choice but to put them in the few rare places where this universe’s muons have become somewhat friendlier—which unfortunately means your front yard. Also, on top of the ferry station, over at that park that used to be a landfill, and at that college you used to attend. Where do you work?”
“The public library branch at—” Then Aislyn understands. She went to the park after work once, and was ogled the whole time by a park service employee who was picking up the trash. That was last month or so. “You’re putting those things wherever I go?”
“Not wherever you go. Just places where you’ve rejected this reality to some degree or another. Even before you were a city, such acts had power. Superpositioned objects change state depending on observation, after all.”
“Okay.” She doesn’t like it. She doesn’t even understand it. But it can’t be a big deal because the Woman in White is a nice woman who looks okay, and so Aislyn has no real reason to be afraid, or to feel used. And anyway, she’s telling Aislyn about it, so isn’t that better than lying? “Oh… ah… okay, then.”
“That’s why I like you, Lyn.” It is her mother’s nickname for her. Her father has never called her Lyn. She’s never allowed anyone else to do so, either. “You’re so accommodating. Who would have thought this city, of all of them, would have such an accommodating component? Such a tolerant girl-shape.”
Yes. Aislyn has always tried to be tolerant. She takes a deep breath. “So, the… adapters?”
“Oh, right. Well, if I can just put down a few more like the one in your yard, I’ll be able to align the… hmm. Errrf.” Aislyn hears the Woman in White shift in irritation, maybe fidgeting. “This place is so primitive. I’m not even sure I can come up with enough analogies to explain it, since you barely understand how this universe works, let alone others.”
“Oh, wow, I didn’t know there was more than one.”
“See? How could you not know something so basic? But oh, there are ex-approaches-infinity-llions. Hakretimajillions. More every minute!” But for once, the Woman in White does not sound delighted by this. “That’s the problem, of course. Once, there was only one universe. One realm where possibility became probability, and life was born. So much life! On nearly every plane and surface, floating along every layer of air, stuffed into every crack. Not like this stingy universe, where life huddles on only a few wet balls surrounding a handful of gassy balls. Ah, Lyn, if only you could see how beautiful it is.”
And in the rearview mirror, something changes, as if in response to the Woman’s wistfulness. Aislyn tries not to stare because she’s driving, and even though it’s only a two-lane road in an area where there are fields and stands of woods in between neighborhoods, she still isn’t interested in learning what a head-on collision feels like. And yet… In quick glances at the rearview, she no longer sees the car that’s tailgating her or the road beyond it, or the school bus that should be turning onto that road from an intersection she just passed. Instead she sees that empty, shadowed room again, from when the Woman first spoke to her. Then she notices a swirl of vapor in the air… or is it liquid? Or is it, more simply, just color? Just a sinuous swath of color that darts and flows across the mirror like something liquid, but also like something alive, and pinky pale against the stark shadows of the background. Something else moves across it—and here Aislyn feels a bit of alarm because it is a black something, and black things are usually bad. It’s only a little bit of alarm, though, because then she sees that the black thing is a rounded, cylindrical blackness, and nothing bad ever came in that shape. This thing makes her think of hockey pucks. She likes hockey, even though the Rangers aren’t very good. (She prefers the Islanders, even if they’re not of her island, exactly.) Or maybe this thing is something like those chocolate cakes that used to come wrapped in foil when she was a kid, and which she hasn’t eaten since she was thirteen because her father once said she was gaining too much weight. What were those called? Ring Dongs? Ding Hos? Regardless, once upon a time she loved them, so when she sees this thing scuttle across the mist-stream of pink and sort of erase it, she just thinks, Huh, weird but kind of cute, and keeps driving.
(Is that movement scuttling, though? The pink mist flinches away. She hears a faint, high-pitched gibber that makes her think of pleading, of pain and struggle and then hopeless despair—and then the mirror is empty again, and the road demands her attention.)
“There are no cities in that first universe,” the Woman continues as they pass woodlands and strip malls. “There are wonders you can’t imagine. Convolutions of physicality and intellect beyond anything this world might ever achieve, but nothing so monstrous as cities. It seems strange to you, I know, to think of something so central to your existence—you are one!—as monstrous. But to the people of that realm, there is nothing more terrifying and terrible.” She utters a little sad laugh. “Than cities.”
Aislyn contemplates this, and finds it not at all difficult to understand. She has stood on the docks of the ferry and gazed across the water at distant, looming Manhattan, and she has trembled in its shadow. “Cities are monstrous,” she says. “Filthy. Too many people, too many cars. Criminals and perverts everywhere. And they’re bad for the environment, too.”