The Other Normals (18 page)

“Welcome to the suburbs,” Ada says.

“No Slip’N Slide?” I joke. Nobody laughs.

“Perry, what exactly happened with Anna?” Mortin presses.

I take a deep breath. “I sort of … exposed myself to Anna.”

“
Exposed
yourself? Exposed what? Your
male parts
?”

“… Yes.”

Ada looks at me for a minute and then puffs her cheeks out and laughs. She tries to hold it in at first, but then bends over and wraps her arms around her chest—

“It’s not funny! It’s not funnier than my Slip’N Slide joke!”

“Oh man,” Mortin says. “You flashed the princess’s correspondent? Why would you do that?”

“She was saying I wasn’t a man, and I wanted to show her I was! You don’t get it—when I went back to Earth, I had a
hair
, okay? Ada, could you please stop laughing and cover your ears? I don’t want you to hear this.”

“Too bad!”

“Mortin, I must’ve done something here to make me hit puberty!”

“Or you might’ve just hit puberty.”

“Well. Maybe.”

“Didn’t anybody ever tell you to be patient?”

“Anna did. Before I pulled my pants off.”

“This is why the Appointees don’t approve pants,” Gamary says. “People on Earth are always taking them off and getting in trouble.”

“All right, very funny. What are we gonna
do
?”

“We’re on the run,” Mortin says. “You may have escaped a bad situation at camp but you’re not in a good one here either. Since you failed to kiss Anna and free the princess, the Appointees have expanded their powers to try and find her. Police can break into people’s homes now. Celates are running wild, killing citizens in the streets. Anyone who questions what’s happening is branded a traitor in league with Ophisa. Subbenia is lost. It’s gone mad. I told my brother to meet us in Upekki. It’s not far from here. There’s a thakerak there, so we can send you back to camp and set things right with Anna. As long as the princess is in Ophisa’s clutches, things will get worse.”

“Upekki’s too far!” Gamary says. “We’ll never make it!”

“Would you rather go back and get killed?”

“We’ll get killed anyway!”

“By who?” I ask. Nobody answers. “Look, you guys aren’t seeing the positive here. We have an adventuring party now! We can free the princess
ourselves
! Ada, do you still have the figure?”

She hands it to me. I hold it. The princess is more tarnished than when I saw her last. I know it doesn’t make sense—she’s only silver—but she also seems sadder, more hopeless. Time is running out.

“GIVE THAT BACK TO ADA,” MORTIN SAYS, “and forget about it. We’re not going on any quest to kill Ophisa and rescue the princess. If anyone could do that, the Appointees already would have. The only way to free the princess is through her correspondent.”

“I wish you’d stop saying that word. I don’t understand about the freaking correspondents.”

“Very few people on Earth do,” Ada says. “We made the important discoveries ourselves, once our universes reconnected, around the time of Marco Polo in your world. Our first explorers stumbled into thakeraks. For reasons we still don’t understand, the thakeraks like to take living beings, codify the position of every single atom in their bodies, and send that information into your universe, where it’s reverse engineered by a corresponding mushroom patch.”

“How did your ‘first explorers’ get back? They weren’t stashing car batteries in the woods, were they?”

“They didn’t get back. They were trapped. Many were killed for being demons or witches. Most were never heard from again. But some assimilated into your cultures.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Why? Earth is a big planet. Lots of hidden spaces. Lots of people who could be convinced that an other normal was a god. The ones who wanted to come back knew that travel had to do with energy, and with mushrooms. They noted where they arrived on Earth and went back to those places to attempt a return. Eventually, three hundred years ago, one traveler hooked up a lightning rod to the clump of mushrooms he’d emerged near when he came to Earth, and got zapped back. Certain mushrooms on Earth need a little kick, and then they act just like thakeraks.”

“What happened when he came back?”

“He emerged just after he left, but his life was radically different. His mother had been alive when he left; when he came back, she had died during childbirth. He was married when he left; when he came back, he’d never met his wife. He’d been dirt poor when he left; when he came back, he was rich.
Di-
just appeared in his bank account, where it hadn’t been before.”

“Somehow,” Mortin says, “the things he did in your world had great ramifications here. The loss of information that brought our universes back together made them
cohere
in specific ways. The traveler reported his findings, but no one believed him: they remembered his life as the skewed version that he birthed. So he started doing experiments. He would head to Earth, run in a circle three times, and come back to see if anything was different. He was the first correspondence
consultant. Paolo Sulice. A brave and crazy individual.”

“After years of experiments, Sulice figured out the guiding principles of correspondationalism,” Ada says. “Every person in your world has an other normal correspondent in ours, whether it’s an ingress or a highborn. Doing things to a human affects that human’s correspondent, and vice versa. Have you ever woken up with a bruise you couldn’t explain?”

“I thought those were my brother.”

“Nope. Something happened to your correspondent.”

“Who
is
my correspondent?”

“We can’t tell you. It’s policy.”

Mortin illustrates: “You get punched in the chest, your correspondent gets chest pains; you fall in love, your correspondent meets someone; you grow up, your correspondent gets more mature.”

“Your correspondent dies, you die,” Ada says.

“Paolo Sulice kept at it. He pioneered analysis techniques to determine what causes would have what effects for people willing to travel in the multiverse. He went into business with Sulice Correspondence House, my former employer.”

“You could go in,” Ada says, “and say that you wanted to be rich, and Sulice would run an analysis on you, determine what had to happen to your correspondent on Earth to make
them
rich, and then go and pull a ‘tweak,’ or small change, to make that happen.”

“So that’s why I’m a ‘tweak’?”

“Yes. Sulice’s work was an unqualified success. It got so
popular that the Appointees started regulating it, and now it’s a very specialized field.”

“Dangerous, too,” Mortin says. “But I have a perfect record: never hurt anybody, never killed anybody, made plenty of clients at my company very happy, and no humans were ever the wiser.”

“Until me.”

“Mortin,” Ada says, “I don’t want to hear you talk yourself up when you just said that disgusting thing in the Monard.”

“I said I was sorry. I snapped. I couldn’t control it.”

“Sure you couldn’t.”

“I was stressed.”

“That’s no excuse.”

“I know,” Mortin admits.

“I know too,” I say.

“What?”

“Stress is no excuse to do disgusting things. It’s easy to rationalize in your head, but it’s wrong.”

“Like how?” Ada seems very interested.

“Like you go through life with girls not liking you, with no one noticing you, with people calling you Mini Pecker, and then you get a chance to do something outrageous, and you think,
I deserve this—I suffered enough at the hands of my peers and now I’m allowed to do whatever I want
. But you’re not. It’s childish.”

We walk in silence for a moment. Then Ada slaps my shoulder. “Maybe that hair’s making you smarter.”

WE WALK BAREFOOT DOWN THE PACKED dirt road. The sun has warmed the taut earth; it feels great radiating up through my soles. Maybe we’re outlaws, and maybe we’re doomed, and maybe we’ve left behind everything normal in our lives, but we do have the sun and the air and they’re free. I focus on my footsteps. Mortin asks Gamary about his daughter.

“She’s fine,” he says. “She’s better. The fever came with the troubles but now it’s gone. I just have to get back to her.”

The road is sparsely traveled. A few times an hour Gamary yells, “Cart!” and Ada hops onto his back and squints and evaluates someone coming toward us. She has terrific eyes and can see for miles over the hills. She describes the approaching party to Mortin (“two hequets with a cargo of pottery”; “a faun with a knapsack with rugs sticking out”), and Mortin nods okay and then for good measure we all get on the far side of Gamary and walk past the traveler without saying a word. When people approach from behind, Ada hears them with her long ears and performs a similar scouting role, sitting backward on Gamary
and reporting to Mortin. In the meantime, she talks to me.

“See the grass? It lives on three inches of rain a year. The whole climate here is hot and dry. Feel.” She reaches off the road to dig up some soil and lets it crumble into my open palm. It has a tangy, unpleasant smell.

“Sulfur?”

“Comes from the runoff of the Ouest Beniss Range.” She nods to the mountains north of us, where Subbenia is—I can still see structures and smoke. “The grasses metabolize it.”

“Cool.” It actually is cool.

“So what’s it like to go to school on Earth? With boys and girls in the same room?”

“It’s … ah … pretty paralyzing and unpleasant.”

“Would you rather have a mentor like Mortin and work with him like I do?”

“Probably.”

“But no one’s allowed to do that on Earth.”

“No, school is like prison. You have to go.”

“And camp?”

“I haven’t been there that long, but it also seems like prison.”

She smiles. I like watching her smile; I like watching her move. Mom and Dad would be proud of me, walking in the country and talking with a girl. Isn’t this what they sent me to camp for?

“CAN WE SING A SONG?” I ASK MORTIN.

“Why?”

“When travelers are off on an adventure, they sing songs to pass the time. Everyone knows that.”

“Maybe travelers who are interested in getting killed.”

“Aw, c’mon. Do one! You’ve got to know one!”

“Do
you
know any songs?” Ada asks.

“I know a song from my brother’s band.”

“What’s your brother like?”

“He’s in rehab. His songs have good melodies but terrible lyrics. I can try to change the lyrics on the fly.”

I look around. No one in any direction. No kids to make fun of me. I tilt my head to the sky and sing, switching to a falsetto to do a shadow of the backing vocals:

We are the stoners (aah-ah!)

We’ll hit you with large stones (aah-ah!)

We’ll never fight alone (ah-ahhh)

On the road

“What is that?” Mortin says. “I didn’t hit anybody with a stone. Did you?”

“I’m improvising!”

“I think it’s good, Peregrine,” says Ada. “What are the backup parts?
Aah-ah?
”

I teach the notes to her, and then to Mortin and Gamary. We sing out variations as we walk through the hills.

My name is Mortin (aah-ah!)

I’ve been cavooortin’ (aah-ah!)

With all these miscreants (ah-ahhh)

But I look good

My name’s Gamary (aah-ah!)

I’m really sorry (aah-ah!)

For selling you out to the cops (ah-ahhh)

Y’all got robbed

My name is Ada (aah-ah!)

I’ll catch you later (aah-ah!)

Unless we catch you first (ah-ahhh)

In a world of—

“Hooves!” Ada yells.

I cup my ears. Faint. It sounds like they’re coming out of the hills, like something is beating the inside of the earth.

“Off the road!” Mortin orders. He runs to the left; Ada,
Gamary, and I follow onto the grass. The hooves get louder quickly; their studded beats fill the air. I trip and tumble down a hill, alternating views of sky and grass as the ground hits me over and over. I glimpse a group of centaurs passing by, done up in shining armor, their arms pumping at their sides as if they’re running as men and horses at the same time.

“Who—are—?” I manage. Ada pulls me behind a rock, where I watch the cloud of dust behind the centaurs recede over the next set of hills. She points to a rolling platform that they’re pulling. Tentacled figures and fish-men stand on it, gazing out. “Oh.”

“Reconnaissance.”

“Officer Tendrile? I thought he wouldn’t leave the city!”

“Me too. If he and his troops are looking for us, we’re no longer a regional issue. Maybe he got a special dispensation from the Appointees to find us.”