American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,207

And if Parson and Mrs. Benjamin were telling the truth, Mother never got any farther than that.

“Yes… She kept us quite organized, on the other side. Segregated, you could even say. There were the five eldest, of which I was the… well. You get the idea. We were the favored ones, the cream of the crop. Then below us were the middle children, who were, let’s say, competent but not extraordinary. Limited. Middling. Nothing to talk about. And then below them were the babies, the wee ones who were little more than teeth, gullets, and however many appendages they chose to have. Formidable, sure, but not clever. Now. I bet you wonder why She chose to split us up like that.”

His eyes are shining strangely, and there is a bitter edge to his voice.

“To keep a tight hand on the wheel, I’d say,” says Mona.

“You are correct, sister,” says Kelly acidly. “It’s so much easier to control everyone when you have them all divided. A lesson Weringer—to use his colloquial name—learned well, and used in the making of Wink. You have to have everyone reined in if you want to keep what’s yours. And on the other side, Mona… we owned everything.”

It’s as he says this that Mona realizes something is bothering her about the screen. Well, not the screen itself, but something around the screen: there are the red curtains on the sides, sure, but behind the curtains, in the shadows, there should be just brick wall, right? And there was brick wall, just a minute ago. Yet now it looks like there’s a gap there: behind the curtains is some kind of backstage area, and something is moving in there, undulating slowly and smoothly, but she can’t really see it…

“The other side isn’t a where, really,” says Kelly. “Nor is it a when. If a world is a machine, with many wheels and belts, ours on that side had millions, even billions more than yours. Compare a pocket watch to a cathedral clock, and you’d be close. It might not have looked like it when you saw it, little sister, but that place was once”—he thins his eyes, and his whole face trembles with passion—“ marvelous. There was no and is no beauty like it, like the places over there. A dark and savage and monstrously wonderful place.” He pauses. “Or at least, I think it was. I think it was wonderful. Now that I am away from it, it seems far better than when I was actually there. It is so curious.” He shrugs, shakes his head. “But never mind. The most important thing about that place, of all the wonderful sights and lands over there, is that they were ours.

“Well. Mother’s, really. Everything was Mother’s. We were Mother’s. She made us. We belonged to Her. We were Her kin, Her spawn, Her children. With Her, we took these places, conquered them, made them our own. We installed ourselves as gods… and we were gods to them, of course we were, because what is a god besides a higher intelligence, and was there any intelligence higher than us? No.

“But we weren’t… unstoppable.” The camera pulls back, and Kelly takes a seat on an empty chair—a chair that was occupied by that older woman just a little while ago. Mona wonders where she went. “It started with no warning, totally and completely out of the blue. Everything just began to… fall apart.”

“How do you mean?” asks Mona.

“Well, you saw what it’s like over there, now. Was it particularly pretty to you?”

“I don’t know what you all find pretty.”

“Touché,” says Kelly. “But no, that is not pretty to me, to us. Yet let me assure you, what you saw is surely the prettiest part of our world, now.”

“What happened? Like… a war?”

He purses his lips, and his eyes search offscreen. “You know… I don’t know.”

“You don’t?”

“No. I admit it. I really don’t. Mother was the only one who knew. She foresaw it. She was the only one who really understood its nature. She told me—and only me, because, well, Miss Mona, I am the favorite son, a bit—that it was because of how huge we were, how powerful, that the mere presence of our family was doing something destructive to the fabric of our world…” He sniffs. “Not very specific, is it?”

“I guess not.” Mona wishes he’d stop talking like she knows what the fuck he means.

“No. But I, being the dutiful First, told the rest of the family.