The Universes Inside the Lighthouse Read online

  “Maybe I threw it back,” she mused, mostly to herself. The rock she’d found on the beach had been so beautiful. She knew she’d kept it, and she was sure she’d never taken it out of this backpack, but it was nowhere to be found. Nothing to be done for it, Emma sighed. She arranged her mouth into a smile and handed the ring back to Eve. “What does that rock do?”

  Eve had been watching Emma’s search with a concerned look on her face. Following Emma’s lead, though, she said nothing further about Emma’s actions. “This rock is an energy rock,” she said. “It follows energy trails.”

  Emma gasped as the memory of finding her own rock came back. It had been the same kind of rock! She remembered thinking the sun had gotten into her eyes, but she knew she’d seen trails of light following Charlie when she’d held the rock. She knew it! Frustrated, she reached frantically into her pack again. It had to be there. It had to!

  But it wasn’t.

  “How does it work?” asked Charlie, giving his deflated sister a little pat on the foot, then steadying himself on hands and knees before raising himself up from the floor.

  “It’s hard to describe until you see it,” said Eve. “It tracks people’s energy. You can ‘charge’ it to follow a specific person, which we’ve done with this one, to Vik’s energy. Or if you don’t, it’ll track the energy of the last person you were thinking about. You have to be touching it for it to work. See this ring?” she said, holding it out for them to inspect. She turned it so they could see the inside of the ring, the side that would touch her finger. “See how the band of the ring has a hole cut out, so that the rock can poke through? That’s so the rock can touch my finger. A lot easier than having to hold it in my hand all the time. I used to sometimes forget I was holding a rock, in my excitement, and I’d drop it. So Dr. Waldo had one of his staff make this ring for me.”

  Emma saw Eve blush again slightly. Against her instincts, she felt herself warming to this girl. “I’d probably drop it, too,” she said. “For sure I would. Heck, I’ve lost the one I had. That was a good idea to make it into a ring.”

  Eve gave Emma a look of thanks, and put on the ring.

  “All right, no time like the present!” she said. “Let’s go find Vik!”

  The door to the other side opened. Emma found herself holding her breath. What would they find? Where would they—

  “Wait,” she said.

  “What the—” said Charlie.

  “But this is the lighthouse lobby,” said Ben. “The same lighthouse. The Balky Point lighthouse.”

  “On our Earth,” said Charlie.

  They all looked at each other, then at Eve, in confusion.

  Eve had no answers. She looked dismayed.

  They stepped out of the storage room. Eve looked around. Her blush had deepened, crawled down her neck.

  “I must have messed up,” she said, her eyes starting to glisten.

  Emma felt a rush of sympathy for this alien girl she was starting to think of as a friend. She reached out and gave her a hug. “It’s okay. It was your first time, right? Just takes practice, I’m sure. Let’s go ask Dr. Waldo. He’ll get us back on track.”

  “We’re losing time,” said Eve. “He’ll be so mad.”

  “He won’t be mad,” said Emma. She realized she didn’t know Dr. Waldo well enough to make that statement, but it would do no good to get Eve more upset. With an arm around Eve, she led the distraught girl back into the elevator. The young men followed.

  Once the door closed behind them, they all waited awkwardly for Eve to open the door to the Hub.

  “So, do you need us to help with something?” asked Charlie, poking at the wall to see if there might be a button somewhere.

  “Should I try my key?” asked Ben, fishing the wishing rock pendant out from under his shirt again.

  Charlie waved his arms around. “Where are the security cameras? Maybe they can see us? Hello! Hello! Open the door please, Dr. Waldo! Hello?” But the door remained stubbornly closed.

  “I don’t understand,” said Eve. “It should be opening. Did I break it? Or did … oh my gosh. Oh no.”

  “What?” said Emma, growing alarmed. “Oh my gosh what?”

  Eve was shuddering, shaking her head. “Did Vik succeed? Did he unravel this spot? Are my father and I stuck here?” She looked at the others. “I mean no offense. Yours is a beautiful planet. It’s just …” She didn’t finish.

  Emma put an arm around Eve again. “It’s okay. We’ll go back to the cabin, and wait for your father to come back with Ed. He’ll know what to do. I’m sure it’s just a glitch. When that woman in the Hub told us they’d had a quake while we were off looking at the Experimental Building, it must have jolted something in the elevator. But I’m sure Dr. Waldo will have figured it out, and will be working on it from his side. And your father, fathers always know what to do. Let’s just go find him.”

  Eve listened to Emma’s speech with a glazed, grim look on her face. She nodded her consent.

  Emma and Charlie looked for their bikes in the shrub by the side of the lighthouse, but someone had taken them. (“Seriously? Seriously?” Charlie said, in disgust.) Ben’s brother had dropped him off at the lighthouse, so he didn’t have transportation, either.

  “As if things weren’t bad enough,” said Charlie.

  The group headed off on the long walk back to the cabin.

  “Mom and Dad are going to be so mad that we went off to explore the universes without telling them,” Charlie said to Emma as they walked.

  “We could just not tell them,” suggested Emma. “They don’t really need to know, do they?”

  A smile broke out across Charlie’s face. “Now you’re starting to think like me, big sister! Proud of you, Em.” He winked his approval at her.

  Emma warmed at his happiness and felt a little better. She hadn’t even been all that excited about exploring the universes (truth be told, she’d been a lot scared at the prospect), but she had been looking forward to the adventure of it. Assuming they didn’t run into any alien dinosaurs or any species whose primary mission in life was to kill humans on sight, or anything of that sort. Gallivanting about the universes was, without a doubt, an unlikely impossibility—which made the possibility of doing it all the more attractive. Emma was not a huge risk taker, but she liked to imagine that she could be one day, if the situation were right and most danger had been removed from the equation. Charlie was far more the type to forge forth without thought for safety or consequence. She admired that in her twin: his ability to throw caution to the wind, his lack of concern for protocol and precedence.

  “Aliens aliens aliens,” Charlie muttered to himself, in time with his steps, first on every step, then in time with the step of his left foot, then in time with his right. When he grew tired of this, he called out to Eve, who was walking alongside Ben, behind Charlie and Emma. “Hey, Eve. Question. Shouldn’t it be something other than ‘universes’? Is ‘universes’ really the plural of ‘universe’?” Charlie turned to walk backward, to face Eve and Ben as he spoke, checking over his shoulder frequently to make sure he didn’t trip over anything. “I mean, isn’t ‘universe’ meant to imply that there’s only one? Like Ben was saying the other night, isn’t that what the ‘uni’ means? Like, a unicycle, it’s a bicycle with one wheel. Unicorn, a horse with one horn. Which, obviously, begs the question of why it’s a unicorn rather than a unihorn, but either way, it only has one horn. Or one corn, I guess. If there’s more than one universe, then doesn’t that mean it’s not actually a universe after all?”

  Eve laughed. “Charlie, it’s English. It’s your language, not mine. But we often say ‘multiverse.’”

  Reaching out to guide backward-walking Charlie around a large pothole, Emma pondered the question. “Yes, ‘uni’ means one, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have more than one universe. There’s more than one unicycle in the world. There are unicycles, plural. If unicorns existed, there could be more than one. I think you can call it a
‘universe’ and still have more than one. If you wanted to refer to all the universes together as one unit, then maybe you’d say ‘polyverse’ or, like Eve said, ‘multiverse.’ But I’m in favor of ‘universes’ for a plural. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.” She looked at Ben to see what he thought.

  “I agree,” he said. “Universes makes sense to me. Just like unicorns and unicycles.”

  “Unicorns do exist, you know” said Eve, with an air of casual revelation.

  Charlie pumped his right arm in the air in a gesture of triumph. “Yes! Unicorns exist? Really? Where?”

  “We saw them once, I can’t remember where. Sometimes, we are somewhere but we aren’t really sure where that somewhere is. Anyway, we saw them once. I don’t know if these were flying unicorns, but they were definitely very much like what you people think of as unicorns.”

  Charlie turned to Emma. “You realize, of course, that the rhinoceros is basically a portly unicorn without fur, right?” He looked mighty pleased with himself, and started walking facing forward again. Emma just shook her head in response.

  Changing the subject, Emma took the opportunity to talk with the gentleman she’d been too shy to say much to yet. “Ben, what did your parents say when you told them you were going to go explore the universes? Did they say it was a bad idea? Or were they all in?”

  Ben didn’t speak immediately. “They were okay with it, I guess,” he said, finally.

  “Did you tell them?” asked Charlie.

  “I may not have told them everything,” he admitted, clearing his throat and kicking a stick off to the side of the road. “I told them what they needed to know.”

  Something about this was a relief to Emma. She’d been putting Ben so high above all the rest of them. To know he might have fudged a bit in talking with his parents, too, was reassuring somehow.

  “Do they even know you’ve been cavorting with aliens?” Emma asked.

  Ben gave her a sheepish smile. “They know. Ed came over and told them everything. That man, he likes a good story. He had to tell Dad that the whole UFO thing was real. They were up half the night two nights ago, taking ten minutes worth of information and making it last for hours. So, yes, they know that part. Ed didn’t tell them I wanted to go along. He left that for me. He did tell them he was going to look around with Milo, though. They told him to be careful. I figured if looking around the island made them worried, then maybe they couldn’t handle my going off to explore the polyverse.”

  Emma’s heart fluttered, just a bit, on hearing him use her word.

  “I may have told them I was going camping for a couple days,” Ben confessed. “My brother knows the truth, though. If something had happened and I hadn’t come back, he’d have known. It’s not like I left without telling anyone. In fact,” he said, looking around at the all-too-familiar island, “it’s not like I left, at all.”

  “I hear you bro,” said Charlie, giving voice and solidarity to his own dejection. “Dead elevator: 1; Charlie: 0.”

  Eve looked sad, and Emma realized she might be taking all this too much to heart. “It’s not your fault, Eve,” she said. “Don’t listen to them. They were just excited about going off on some cowboy adventure, but they probably couldn’t have handled it, anyway. It’s not your fault. And the elevator isn’t dead.” She shot a disapproving look at Charlie. “It’s just not working right now. You’ll get home. Don’t worry. We’ll make sure you get home.”

  Each lost in his or her own thoughts, eventually the foursome reached the cabin. When they got there, they saw a strange car in the driveway.

  “Whose car is that?” asked Charlie. “Ben, do you recognize it? Our car is gone, too. I wonder if Mom or Dad went to join Milo and Ed?” he said. A bitter note in his voice indicated his disappointment in the abrupt end of his own exploits.

  The front door was open. Emma walked in first, followed by Charlie and the others. “Mom! Dad! We’re back!” she called out with forced cheerfulness.

  Amy Renee came rushing out from the kitchen with a look of horror on her face.

  Emma was immediately alarmed. “Mom, what is it? Is Dad okay? Ed and Milo? What’s wrong?”

  The look on her own face, however, quickly turned to horror as well.

  Behind Amy Renee, coming out of the kitchen, was Charlie. Another Charlie. And then, behind him, another Emma.

  “Oh, no, oh, no, oh no …” said Eve. She turned to Emma, at her side, and said in a low voice, “Emma, I think I’ve really messed up … I don’t think this is your Earth.”

  Emma, Charlie, Eve, and Ben were sitting in the cabin’s living room with the other Emma (whom Charlie had dubbed “Parallel Emma”), the other Charlie (“Parallel Charlie”), Amy Renee (“Parallel Mom”), and Glen (“Parallel Dad”). On this Earth, the Nelsons had never heard of Milo or Eve. They knew Ed, and this was indeed his cabin, but he wasn’t there at the time. They knew nothing about the lighthouse or all the universes it held within its walls. Eve, who had realized what this meant for her own situation—she had no idea where her father was, where she was, or how to get to Dr. Waldo—explained the situation as calmly as she could.

  Both Earthlings and parallel Earthlings were in a bit of shock.

  “Another Earth. You’re saying there’s another Earth. If the two of you weren’t here,” said Parallel Amy Renee, indicating Emma and Charlie, “I don’t know that I’d believe you. You say you got here in … an elevator?” The disbelief in her voice was clear.

  Emma knew that tone well. If it hadn’t happened to her, she wouldn’t have believed it either. “Not an elevator, really. That’s just what they call it. It’s … well, it’s a portal, or a doorway.”

  “Does it move? I don’t understand how it works. Is it a spaceship?” asked Glen, literally sitting on the edge of his seat, leaning forward, as though being closer to the strange visitors might somehow help him understand the impossible things they were saying.

  “It, uh …” Emma looked at Eve for help.

  “To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what happens,” said Eve. “Obviously, we can’t stand outside and watch. The room seals itself up. It certainly feels like it’s moving, but I guess I don’t actually know if it does. And I don’t know what would happen if someone else tried to use it at the same time we were using it. Sort of like an elevator, we think there’s just one portal for anyone to use at any one time. But it’s not a spaceship, no. It can’t go just anywhere. It’s fixed, in a way. Fixed in one spot in the universes.” She gave them the tied-quilt analogy her father had used when explaining to Emma, Charlie, and Ben. “There are millions of others, throughout the planets and universes, but each of them just works within a fixed point. At least, as far as we know.”

  On hearing herself use the phrase Charlie had accused Dr. Waldo of overusing, Eve smiled softly and her eyes twinkled. She looked at Charlie and tossed him a knowing laugh. “As far as we know,” she repeated.

  Charlie caught her laugh and returned it twofold.

  Parallel Charlie, as yet unfettered with undying love for Eve, wanted to hear more about the other Earth. He wanted to know everything. “Exactly how much of your Earth and our Earth is alike, and how much is different?” he asked, as though anyone there were qualified to answer. “We’re twins, you’re twins. This island is Dogwinkle Island here and where you’re from. But the car we rented is different from the car you rented.” In the course of discussion, they’d learned the car out front, which Charlie had surmised must belong to someone else, was actually this parallel family’s rental car. “So there are small differences. Are there big differences? Are you guys from Minsota too?”

  Emma and Charlie looked at each other. “You mean Minnesota?” said Emma.

  “Minsota,” said Parallel Charlie, shaking his head. “Our original home state, before we moved out west, was Minsota.”

  “Minnesota: Canada to the north, North and South Dakota to the west, Iowa to the south, Wisconsin to the east?” aske
d Emma.

  “Minsota: Canada to the north, Dakota to the west, Iowa to the south, Wisconsin to the east,” said Parallel Charlie.

  “No. Minnesota. But your planet, it’s called Earth, right? That’s the same?” asked Charlie.

  “Earth. Indeed,” said Parallel Charlie.

  “Eight planets in the solar system?” said Charlie.

  “No, nine. Huh.” Parallel Charlie gave an exaggerated frown.

  “Did you guys get to keep Pluto?” asked Charlie. “We totally had to give up Pluto. Poor Pluto.”

  “No, there’s no Pluto,” said Parallel Emma. “Our planets are Hermes, Aphrodite, Earth, Ares, Zeus, Kronos, Hera, Poseidon, Dis.”

  Emma’s eyes lit up with recognition. “Named after the Greek gods rather than the Roman gods!” she said, quite pleased with herself. “Ours are the same. Just different names for them. The Roman god Mercury is the Greek god Hermes; the Roman goddess Venus is the Greek goddess Aphrodite; and so on. Our planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. Dis would be Pluto, god of wealth. Uranus isn’t Hera, though, but I guess I’d rather have a planet Hera than a planet Uranus, frankly.” She wrinkled her nose in disfavor. “That’s weird, actually. Uranus is a Greek god. It would have been nice if they’d named the planet Caelus, after the Roman god, like all the other planets. Caelus is the Roman version of Uranus, ‘Father Sky.’ But no, they bucked the trend to go with with Uranus. Bad move, planet namers.” Two years prior, Emma had had to do a science report on Uranus, and her classmates never let her forget it. She was still annoyed with 18th century German astronomer Johann Elert Bode for even suggesting the planet name.

  “Same gods, different names. That’s crazy,” said Charlie. He fist-bumped Parallel Charlie. “Awesome.”

  Emma had pulled out her notebook and was making a list of all the differences between Earth and this parallel Earth.

  “What’s the list for?” asked Ben.

  Emma blushed. “I just … I make lists. I like order, I guess. And lists.”