“I just thought you’d like something. I know it’s a long flight.” I hold out the basket. “You can still resent me, even if you take them.”
She smiles again, her mouth wide and full. “I intend to.”
She takes the basket, but it’s more out of pity than wanting the fruit.
“I’ll miss you,” I say.
“So look for me,” she says. “I’m only missing on a few hundred worlds, and this is just one more. I recommend Earth 83 me. She’s my favorite.”
A woman in a jumpsuit tells the agents they’re done, and the men push Star along. She looks at me over her shoulder.
“Don’t waste your time feeling guilty,” she says. “It’ll be you soon enough.”
Over my dead body…but that’s not what she needs to hear. She needs my absence more than anything. A witness to the shame makes it worse, even if it’s a friend. So I nod goodbye, and turn away.
* * *
THERE ARE INFINITE worlds. Worlds upon worlds into absurdity, which means there are probably worlds where I am a plant or a dolphin or where I never drew breath at all. But we can’t see those. Eldridge’s machine can read and mimic only frequencies similar to ours, each atom on the planet contributing to the symphony. They say that’s why objects like minerals and oil can be brought in easily, but people have to be gone from the world first—their structure is so influenced by their world’s unique frequency there’s no possibility of a dop. Before we lost 382, there were rumblings of war. I’m not sure how many nuclear bombs it would take to change the song of a place until we can’t hear it anymore, but we lost 382 over the course of an hour: a drastic shift making the signal weak, then another, then nothing.
It should scare us more than it does, but they were already an alien territory anyway. That’s why the number was the highest. Each number indicates a degree of difference, a slight frequency shift from our own. Earths One through Ten are so similar they are hardly worth visiting. When I pull from there, no more than twice a year, it’s just to make sure the intel is still exactly like ours. Three of the worlds in which I still live are in the first ten Earths.
There is something gratifying about going places where I’m dead and touching things I was never even meant to see. In my apartment I keep a collection of things from those places in sealed bags on the wall. I’ve never catalogued them, but I can identify each item on sight: dirt from the lot where my childhood home would have been in a world where the slums never made it that far; smooth rocks from a river that’s been dead on my world for centuries; a jade earring given to me by a girl on another Earth who wanted me to remember her, but who only let me love her at all because she didn’t know where I came from. There are hundreds, and when I get back from Earth 175, there will be one more.
The worlds we can reach are similar to ours in atmosphere, flora, and fauna, so most of their viruses already exist here. But just in case, I seal my souvenirs in the bags Eldridge used to use for specimen collection, before they got bored playing biologists and shifted hard to mining and data collection.
I’m staring at my clothes, trying to figure out which to bring. It’s hard, living in Wiley while visiting Ashtown. Not a lot of people go between. Sure, Wileyites will visit Ashtown like tourists, and Ashtown kids sometimes get scholarships to Wiley schools, but no one ever tries to fit in both places. Wiley City is like the sun, and Ashtown a black hole; it’s impossible to hover in between without being torn apart. I’ve spent my time in the city accumulating the kind of clothes that will make me look like I’ve never been to Ashtown at all. If I were smart, I’d keep a set of Ashtown clothes for these trips instead of standing out like a mirror in the desert every time I go. But deep down, I don’t want to fit in. I don’t want to look like I belong there, because one day I want to pretend I never did.
I’m fingering a blouse I can’t bring—true black synthetic silk, nothing a former Ruralite holy girl would wear—when my sister calls.
Instead of a greeting, she answers with a grunt of frustration.
“Preparations going that well, huh?” I say, sitting on the bed. Esther is still just a teenager, but the amount of responsibility she’s inherited makes her seem older.
“It’s fine,” she says, voice primly forced. Ruralites aren’t allowed to be angry, not at other people, because it would violate their code of endless compassion and understanding.
“Michael still being useless?”
No one tests Esther’s faith, or her temper, like her twin brother.
“Cara, you know all people have value and use in the eyes of God. Michael would be a valuable contribution to the dedication…if he’d shown up at any of the preparations.”
Ah, there it is, Esther’s rage—the venom no less potent for all its masking.
“And now we have Cousin Joriah saying he might drop in and—”
I roll off the bed. “Joriah?”
“Yes, you remember. Tall, red hair? He moved out here for a little while when we were young, but then left for the deep wastes as a missionary.”
Of course I don’t remember. I can’t.
“He’s based in some small town on the other side of the dead lands now, but Dad thinks he might make the pilgrimage.”
She goes on, but I’m not really listening. I reach under my bed, pulling out my box of journals. Esther said when we were young, so I pick a journal from not long after Esther’s father married my mother. Caramenta, age 13 is written on its cover. Esther would have been five.
“Hey, I gotta go, but I’ll see you soon.”
I hit the button on my cuff to disconnect from Esther, then begin searching through the journal. Eventually I find an entry mentioning Joriah moving in, and skim a bit longer until he moves away again, gleaning all I can about him. Apparently he was very funny, though not great at personal hygiene. I find a few more references in later journals, but then it really is time to go. My mother won’t yell if I’m late—not like she used to—but she’ll cloak herself in this sad, martyred quiet I can’t stand. I put the journals back. In them, Cousin Joriah is just called Jori. I whisper both versions of the name so that when I say them out loud later, it won’t sound like it’s the first time.
I’ve gotten rid of a lot of things from my past, but I’ll always keep the journals. I read them like data from another world, doing research on people who love me. I don’t write now. I make lists in my current journal, but that only started as a way for me to practice writing in Eldridge’s code, so I’m not sure it counts. In the box under my bed there is one journal for every year, two some years, but I’ve had the same one for six years now and haven’t managed to fill it up. Maybe it’s because there’s so little I’m sure of these days.