“Yes, yes.” The Woman flicks a hand; Aislyn sees the edge of fingers in the rearview, momentarily occluding the stark-shadowed place. When the Woman’s fingers have passed, Aislyn sees that the black cylindrical thing is back, lingering now at the edge of the mirror. It’s not still; it’s bouncing up and down, arrhythmically. Weird, but cute.
The Woman continues, “All of that is true, but that’s not what really makes cities so awful. You must understand some of it now, yes? You’ve seen beyond this realm into the edge of other realities. It is the nature of all thinking entities to know ourselves, at least to some degree.”
“I—” Aislyn starts to protest. She dislikes being told that she is this thing she loathes. She also doesn’t understand whatever the Woman is trying to say. “I guess?”
“Yes. Well.” Another hand flutter. The hockey dong—Aislyn snickers at this, it feels dirty, better go with Ding Ho instead—abruptly stops bouncing or pulsing or whatever it’s doing, as if it has noticed the Woman’s movement. As if the two images have anything to do with each other. But the place of stark shadows isn’t real, is it? It seems farther away, somewhere well beyond the rear window of the car. She has been sure, until this moment, that it was an optical illusion—a reflection off one of the back seat windows, combined with passing shifts of sunlight. Or a weird daydream. She did have corned beef hash for breakfast; maybe the mirror stuff is undigested beef or underdone potato.
(Much, much, much later, when the whole business is nearly over, she will look back on this incident and think, Confirmation bias is a bitch.)
“The problem,” the Woman continues, now working up to a real rant if Aislyn reads her voice correctly, “is that cities are rapacious. There is infinite room in existence for all the universes that spin forth from life—even universes as bizarre as this one! Room for everyone. But some life forms cannot be content with just their ecological niche; they are born invasive. They punch through—and when they do, they turn ten thousand realities into nothing, like that.” She snaps her fingers. “And they can do much, much worse, if they put their backs into it. Or even if they don’t.”
Something odd is happening in the world of stark shadows. The Ding Ho—is it bigger? No, just closer to the mirror, although the perspective seems off. Abruptly there’s a faint waft of cold air on the back of Aislyn’s neck, which feels like bliss. It’s June, and the car’s air conditioner isn’t working well; it only sporadically spits out gusts of actual cold. Probably needs fluid. Maybe the Woman in White has opened one of the vents in the back seat.
“That, uh, sounds awful,” Aislyn says, trying to keep an eye on her speed. She’ll never hear the end of it from her father if she gets a ticket.
“It is a catastrophe that makes the end of your entire species a mere triviality.” Aislyn actually hears her shrug. “What’s one more extinction, after all, when numberless intelligent species are wiped out every day by the horror of cities?”
The Woman has just lost Aislyn. “Wait, what?”
“You work in a library. Have you read any Lovecraft?”
Aislyn rubs the back of her neck. The cold is starting to give her a muscle spasm or something. She wants to say something to the Woman in White about shutting the back seat vent, but around them, the occasional woods have given way to auto shops and gas stations, and billboards for shopping malls in New Jersey. This means they’re almost at the library where Aislyn works. She’s got some muscle relaxants in her purse if it gets too bad.
“I’ve read him a little,” she replies. Science fiction and fantasy have never really been her taste, except in romance; she enjoys giggling over stories about alien men with big blue penises. One of the senior librarians is a big Lovecraft fan, though, and he kept insisting that she read some until she finally gave in. “I mean, The Shadow over Innsmouth was really rambly, but I get why people make movies about the monsters. I tried some of his short stories, too.” Those had been even more rambly. Still, the one she’d read that was about New York—set in Red Hook, where Ikea is—had sounded pretty accurate to how her father describes Brooklyn: full of criminals and scary foreigners, and gangs of foreigners being criminal. She’d liked that one, at least, because its protagonist was Irish, and afraid of tall buildings.
The Woman’s voice has grown grim. “Lovecraft was right, Aislyn. There’s something different about cities, and about the people in cities. Individually, your kind are nothing. Microbes. Algae. But never forget that algae once wiped out nearly all life on this planet.”
“Wait, what?” That doesn’t sound right. Algae? “Really?”
“Really. Cities are an endemic problem of life amid these branches of existence: put enough human beings in one place, vary the strains enough, make the growth medium fertile enough, and your kind develops… hybrid vigor.” Aislyn can actually hear the Woman in White shudder elaborately, the cloth of her outfit shifting. “You eat each other’s cuisines and learn new techniques, new spice combinations, trade for new ingredients; you grow stronger. You wear each other’s fashions and learn new patterns to apply to your lives, and because of it you grow stronger. Even just one new language infects you with a radically different way of thinking! Why, in just a few thousand years you’ve gone from being unable to count to understanding the quantum universe—and you’d have made it there faster if you didn’t keep destroying each other’s cultures and having to start over from scratch. It’s just too much.”
Aislyn frowns. “What’s wrong with learning a new language?” She taught herself some Gaelic as a child. It’s hard to pronounce, and with no other Gaelic speakers around that she could practice on, she’s forgotten nearly all of what she learned, outside of a few colorful phrases and some songs. But she cannot comprehend how learning it was a bad thing.
“Nothing. I’m just describing your nature. I don’t judge. But it’s a problem because as you grow, your cities grow. You change one another, city and people, people and city. Then your cities start bringing multiple universes together—and once a few such breaches have occurred, why, the whole structure of existence is weakened.”
Now the Woman in White leans forward. Aislyn can see her hand on the headrest of the passenger seat. “Countless people, dying on countless worlds, and you don’t even notice. Galaxies crushed beneath the dread, cold foundations of your reality. Some of your victims are aware enough to cry out to you, you know, but you do not hear. Some try to fight you, flee to nearby realms in hope of sanctuary, even worship you in hope of mercy—but not one of those poor souls has a chance. Does that sound fair to you, Aislyn? Do you understand why I have to stop you?”
In a horrible way, Aislyn does. And if it’s true… God, it’s awful. But… she frowns, and feels a little guilty for thinking this, but… is it evil? To some degree, what the Woman is talking about sounds like what Ms. Pappalardo, one of the librarians, who’s also a vegan, always tells Aislyn: Countless living beings have been enslaved so you could have honey in your tea. Aislyn’s read that this is wrong anyway; the bees make more honey than they can use, and the relationship between bees and humans is more symbiotic than slavery. But the real reason Aislyn doesn’t stop putting honey in her tea is because… for God’s sake, it’s just honey.