American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,208

And we watched helplessly as, one by one, the worlds and places we had conquered… faded. Burned. And were lost. No. No, gods we were not.” He looks at her, his gaze sharp. “What I will tell you now, Miss Mona, is part of some very private conversations I had with Mother. No one, I do really mean no one, including—what does he call himself now—oh that’s right, Parson, knows anything about them.”

“If you think I’m going to tell anyone, don’t worry,” says Mona. “I’m not on friendly terms with much of your family.”

“Are you not, now,” says Kelly softly.

Mona sees another hint of movement in the backstage space behind the curtains. She tries not to let Kelly see her looking (Is Kelly even the way First looks at things? It’s not like his eyes on the screen really work, right?), but Mona finally catches a glimpse of what’s back there before it retreats into the dark.

She tenses up. The hairs along Mona’s arms slowly stand at attention. She tries very hard not to show that she noticed.

It looked like… tentacles. As if the wall behind the screen, and perhaps the wall on either side of the theater, and maybe even the ceiling and floor and every crawl space in this building, is packed with endless, endless tentacles, some the size of tree trunks, some like the finest, softest hair, all of them writhing and twisting in the dark…

That’s you, isn’t it? she thinks. The real you. What you really are, behind this illusion…

“Mother came to me,” continues Kelly, apparently unaware of any problem at all, “and told me She’d found something. Noticed something, rather. She said She’d discovered a place in our world… where everything was thin. Not just thin—bruised.” Kelly smiles, but it’s utterly humorless. “I don’t suppose I need to tell you that this occurred just before our own world began to fall apart.”

Mona thinks, Oh, shit.

Kelly flashes that mirthless smile again. “What Mother had concluded, after examining these bruised portions, was that there were other worlds than our own. Realities we never knew about. And here She did not speak in a spatial sense—not merely civilizations on other—what do you call them here—planets, but contained, functioning worlds existing within dimensions lower and more rudimentary than our own. There was life there, intelligence, and that intelligence was pushing at the boundaries of its own little world into our own. And Mother thought, just maybe, we could push back. And go through.

“It was revolutionary to me. And also ludicrous. Why would we ever want to abandon what we had? I mean, at the time we were totally safe. And were we not happy here? I asked Her. What more could anyone want? But Mother was silent. I could tell She was troubled. Which, naturally, troubled me.

“I did not have much time to dwell on it, though. Because that was when everything began to burn, and fall apart. A holocaust on an unimaginable level. Whole aspects of our reality, shorn away like dead skin. Yet Mother had an answer. One I’d never have expected.” The camera slowly starts to pull in on Kelly’s face again. “She told me She had already made contact with the other side.”

“When was this?” asks Mona.

“Mm? Trying to arrange a mental time line?” He laughs. “I wouldn’t bother. Time over there is not time over here. It was just at the beginning of the Fall, though. Just when things began to turn. Mother told us we could not stop it. Nothing we could do. There was only one way to survive: we had to escape our world, and find sanctuary in this new one, this primitive, undeveloped place. We asked Her, How? How can we do this? How can we help? And Mother said She had to do this alone. She would go there, to whatever this place was, arrange things for us, and return to take us to safety.

“I, the First, was chosen to assist Her in this task. And what I found was quite surprising. Mother’s preparations did not have the look of something rushed, of an emergency solution—it looked like She’d been ready for this for some time.” He smiles. “I bet you can guess what Her preparations looked like.”

Mona thinks. Then she says, “A mirror?”

“Bingo! Mother had constructed a mirror, or a lens of some kind that could look beyond our world and into those bordering it. She told me She had created it when She first learned of the