of the law. There are, of course, risks—”
“I would like to request a lawyer,” Dolly said.
Roz took a breath that might change the world. “We’ll proceed as if that were your legal right, then.”
Roz’s house let her in with her key, and the smell of roasted sausage and baking potatoes wafted past.
“Sven?” she called, locking herself inside.
His even voice responded. “I’m in the kitchen.”
She left her shoes in the hall and followed her nose through the cheaply furnished living room, as different from Steele’s white wasteland as anything bounded by four walls could be. Her feet did not sink deeply into this carpet, but skipped along atop it like stones.
It was clean, though, and that was Sven’s doing. And she was not coming home to an empty house, and that was his doing too.
He was cooking shirtless. He turned and greeted her with a smile. “Bad day?”
“Nobody died,” she said. “Yet.”
He put the wooden spoon down on the rest. “How does that make you feel, that nobody has died yet?”
“Hopeful,” she said.
“It’s good that you’re hopeful,” he said. “Would you like your dinner?”
“Do you like music, Sven?”
“I could put on some music, if you like. What do you want to hear?”
“Anything.” It would be something off her favorites playlist, chosen by random numbers. As it swelled in the background, Sven picked up the spoon. “Sven?”
“Yes, Rosamund?”
“Put the spoon down, please, and come and dance with me?”
“I do not know how to dance.”
“I’ll buy you a program,” she said. “If you’d like that. But right now just come put your arms around me and pretend.”
“Whatever you want,” he said.
Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer
KEN LIU
My name is Renee Tae-O ‹star› ‹whale› Fayette. I’m in the sixth grade.
There is no school today. But that’s not what makes it special. I’m nervous and I can’t tell you why yet. I don’t want to jinx it.
My friend Sarah and I are working on our school project together in my bedroom.
I’m not old enough to create my own world, but I’m very happy with the world my parents have given me. My bedroom is a Klein bottle so I don’t ever feel like I’m boxed in. A warm yellow light suffuses the room and fades gradually into darkness at infinite distance. It’s old-fashioned, like something from years ago, when designs still tried to hint at the old physical world. Yet the smooth, endless surface makes me feel secure, something to hang onto, being enclosed and outside at the same time. It is better than Sarah’s room in her home, which is a Weierstrass “curve”: continuous everywhere, but nowhere differentiable. Jagged fractals no matter how closely you look. It’s certainly very modern, but I don’t ever feel comfortable when I visit. So she comes over to our place a lot more often.
“Everything good? Need anything?” Dad asks.
He comes “in” and settles against the surface of my bedroom. The projection of his twenty-dimensional figure into this four-space begins as a dot that gradually grows into an outline that pulses slowly, bright, golden, though a little hazy. He’s distracted, but I don’t mind. Dad is an interior designer, and the services of the firm of Hugo ‹left arrow› ‹right arrow› Fayette and Z. E. ‹CJK Ideograph 4E2D› ‹CJK Ideograph 4E3D› Pei are in so much demand that he’s busy all the time, helping people build their dream worlds. But just because he has little time to spend with me doesn’t mean he’s not a good parent. For example, he’s so used to working in much higher dimensions that he finds four dimensions very boring. But he still designed my bedroom as a Klein bottle because experts agree that it is best for children to grow up in a four-dimensional environment.
“We are all set,” Sarah and I think together. Dad nods, and I get the feeling that he would like to think with me about the reason for our anxiety. But Sarah is there, and he feels he can’t bring it up. After a moment, he whisks away.
The project we are working on is about genetics and inheritance. Yesterday at school, Dr. Bai showed us how to decompose our consciousnesses into their constituent algorithms, each further broken down into routines and subroutines, until we got to individual instructions, the fundamental code. Then he explained to us how each of our parents gave us some of these algorithms, recombined and shuffled the routines during the process of our births, until we were whole persons, infant consciousnesses new to the universe.
“Gross,” Sarah thought.
“It’s kind of cool,” I thought back. It was neat to think that my eight parents each gave me a part of themselves, yet the parts changed and recombined into me, different from all of them.
Our project is to create our family trees and trace out our descent, all the way up to the Ancients, if possible. My tree is much easier, since I have only eight parents, and they each had even fewer parents. But Sarah has sixteen parents and it gets very dense up there.
“Renee,” Dad interrupts us. “You have a visitor.” His outline is not hazy at all now. The tone of his thoughts is deliberately restrained.
A three-dimensional woman comes out from behind him. Her figure is not a projection from higher dimensions—she’s never bothered to go beyond three. In my four-dimensional world, she looks flat, insubstantial, like an illustration of the old days in my textbooks. But her face is lovelier than I remembered. It’s the face that I fall asleep to and dream of. Now the day really is special.
“Mom!” I think, and I don’t care that the tone of my thoughts makes me seem like a four-year-old.
Mom and Dad had the idea for me first, and they asked their friends to help out, to all give me a bit of themselves. I think I got my math aptitude from Aunt Hannah and my impatience from Uncle Okoro. I don’t make friends easily, the same as Aunt Rita, and I like things neat, just like Uncle Pang-Rei. But I got most of me from Mom and Dad. On my tree, I’ve drawn the branches for them the thickest.
“Will you be visiting long?” Dad thinks.
“I’ll be here for a while,” Mom thinks. “I have some things I want to tell her.”
“She’s missed you,” Dad thinks.
“I’m sorry,” Mom thinks. Her face fails to hold her smile for a moment. “You’ve done a wonderful job with her.”
Dad looks at Mom, and it seems that he has more to think, but he nods and turns away, his outline fading.
