The Chaos Curse (Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond #3) - Sayantani DasGupta Page 0,55
was how he was dressed. The last time we’d seen him, he’d been wearing a turban, kurta, and pajamas. Now he was in gray robes and a floppy gray wizard’s hat, and carrying a wand that he kept twirling and tossing in the air like some kind of overage marching band baton twirler. His outfit reminded me too much of a certain wizarding headmaster from another famous story, but I decided to keep quiet about the scientist’s fashion choices.
“How are the star babies, Smartie-ji?” Neel asked. He was referring to the fact that the last time we’d seen him, Einstein-ji was teaching star nursery school in an outer space nebula known in the other dimension as Maya Pahar. “I didn’t ask you before, but did you retire from teaching?”
“Oh, I’m just here temporarily, so I got a substitute!” Albert Einstein flipped, so his folded legs were up and his head was down. Despite this feat of gravity, his wizard’s hat stayed on his head. “Dr. Hawking is very popular with ze star babies! He is most excellent at remembering ze nursery rhymes and playing ring around ze rosie.”
“Dr. Hawking?” I asked. “Like Dr. Stephen Hawking?”
“Ze one and ze same!” said Einstein-ji, pointing at me with his wand.
Okay. Why not. Stephen Hawking, the world-famous scientist who had recently passed away (at least in this dimension!), was now teaching star babies in an outer space star nursery in Maya Pahar.
I squinted at the floating scientist-slash-wizard. “No offense, Your Smartness, but how are you here? I know you can exist in Maya Pahar because of, um, something to do with the fabric of space-time …” My voice trailed off.
“Oh, pfft! Death! Just transfer of matter from one plane of existence to another, you know!” Einstein flipped back around in midair.
“He shouldn’t be able to be here, actually, and certainly not in that outfit,” said Shady Sadie as she typed something into a computer keyboard. “But because of the work of the Anti-Chaos Committee, many interdimensional and intercultural stories are slipping into one another. The boundaries between stories, but also dimensions, seems to be weakening. It’s probably how all of you ended up in this slightly wrong version of New Jersey.”
“You know about that?” I breathed. “My parents, and Jovi and Zuzu …”
Neel shot me a confused look. I raised my eyebrows and shrugged back at him. He might be mad at me for thinking his mom was a villain, but I still had totally good reasons to be mad at him too. I’d been all alone, dealing with this bizarre version of New Jersey, while he was—what? Planning how to have a fuzzy and warm new relationship with his monstrous mama?
“Science and stories are not so different, my young friends,” said K. P. Babu. “They both ask the big questions of life and both seek answers to make sense of the mysterious world around us.”
“But now Sesha and his Anti-Chaos Committee are trying to simplify those answers!” Einstein-ji added. His accent made it so that he pronounced “chaos” like “kah-os.”
“But I thought you and Dr. Hawking didn’t believe the universe needed chaos, Professor Einstein!” I said, remembering back to what Ned-slash-Nidhoggr had been arguing about the need for a universal theory, one singular story. “I thought you were both looking for a theory of everything!”
“Yes, that is true,” Einstein-ji agreed, giving his wand a toss before impressively catching it with one foot. “But we never found such a theory, did we? It was in the very search that our knowledge grew.”
“What do you mean?” I looked from one scientist to the next, and then back to my friends. The animals, Lal, and Neel all just shrugged.
“Let us go back to ze beginning, Prinzess,” said Einstein-ji, waving his hand vaguely at Sadie. She typed some more stuff into the keyboard, pulling up an image of a black funnel-type thing—kind of like the drawing of the Victrola in the three-doored room. “Do you know what a singularity is?”
I wrinkled my brow. “No?”
Bunty cleared their throat. “Do you mean, the idea of a superhuman artificial intelligence that will outstrip human intellect?”
“Show-off,” muttered Tuntuni, and Neel gave the bird a glare.
“No, tiger-ji, not that sort of singularity,” said K. P. Babu patiently. “Dr. Einstein means in the context of space science.”
“Well, then, no, I don’t know,” admitted Bunty with an embarrassed cough.
Everybody else, for their parts, looked just as clueless as I felt.
“A singularity is a one-dimensional point from where the entire multiverse was born. Think about