“And you, Ellie, do not get to be smug.” The crinkle of their bark pivots toward her. “At least Daniel here has made their choice. They know who they’re fetching water for.”
“There’s no mystery.” Daniel can’t help being chivalrous, no matter how much Ellie wants him to stop. “The Chief Architect asked them to look into this.”
“They wanted to know who was behind the side channel,” Ellie says simply. “As far as I can tell, we did it to ourselves by accident about a century ago because some of us really wanted quantum mechanics in our universe.”
“Again, this is all very ‘maintainer.’”The twist the Head Archivist puts on that last word could set it spinning for centuries. “I take it there’s no thought of reverting quantum mechanics from your universe.”
“I think that ship has sailed.” Ellie can be dry, too. “Besides, it’s backward compatible with the physics as it was. And the side channels are fixable. Quantum mechanics will still work without them.”
Ellie is guessing. But anything Ahdi can do overnight, a crack team of maintainers has to be able to do. In a month or three.
“You don’t think this secret cabal is removing those side channels?” the Head Archivist asks.
“Not according to the guy Daniel threw out their apartment window.”
“This is forcing me to believe what maintainers across multiple universes say about you, Daniel.” They grab a pen and startscribbling on the paper. “What does Ahdi think of you defenestrating someone?”
“I live thirty feet up.” Daniel looks as though that excused everything. “The man had plenty of time to get somewhere safe.”
“So it left Ahdi speechless.”
“Pretty much,” Ellie answers for him.
“Back to my point, Ellie.” They lay a few of their hands flat on their desk. “You don’t have to be part of your elders’ machinations. It’s not what your mother wanted. Your sister involved themself, and your mother stopped working with them entirely.”
“What?” Ellie almost falls off her chair.
Daniel, for his part, remains perfectly calm. Chris would have to do something good to surprise him.
“I thought I was quite clear.” They stop scribbling for a moment. “Your sister threw their lot in with Neeson, who has since become your Chief Verifier, whose perversions your mother worked tirelessly to remove. I’m not surprised that, when your mother fell ill, your sister tried to cut them off from their allies.”
The first time she saw Mom sneaking out of Chris’s house, it was because Amtrak was late and Ellie didn’t get there until after midnight. Just as Mom had told Ellie to let Chris have her way, Mom swore Ellie to secrecy. She refused to explain why, but it wasn’t like Chris would ever let Mom out unescorted. Ellie kept Mom’s secret.
“I helped sneak them out at night.” The words fall slowly from her as she tries out all the ways the puzzle pieces can fit together. “In their final months of consciousness, Mom needed more and more help sneaking away. I had to pick the lock to let them out of their room. Maintainers came to pick them up. They wouldn’t say what for. I didn’t recognize them and they didn’t say who they were.”
What Ellie doesn’t say is that, by then, Chris, who had force-fedMom before chemo started, had started to starve her. Ellie secreted away food during the day to feed Mom once she was sure Chris was asleep. In the mornings, whenever Chris asked whether she heard any noises during the night, Ellie smiled sweetly and lied.
Chris took care of Mom the way she had taken care of Ellie as a kid, with an added dollop of “everyone must see how hard I’m working.” That was enough to explain why Mom couldn’t leave her room whenever she wanted. No schemes involving secret cabals of maintainers necessary. However, “Chris was always going to keep Mom locked up regardless” is not the slam-dunk argument Ellie needs to refute the Head Archivist.
“Your desire to help your mother is commendable.” The Head Archivist reaches for and squeezes Ellie’s hand. “However, they kept you in the dark. They pointedly did not tell you what they were doing. Getting involved is not something they would have wanted.”
“Mom couldn’t know things would turn out like this.” Ellie’s gaze drills through the Head Archivist. “They built some monstrosity to trap Mom in a comatose half death. With that, they exploited apparently already existing side channels in our universe to take advantage of the speculative presents where Mom survived. I didn’t make any friends when I dismantled their monstrosity. And now, they’re tampering with the machinery of our universe. Does that have something to do with my mom? Having uncovered this, I need to get to the bottom of it.”
“Oh, Ellie. Your curiosity and insistence on the truth speaks well of you. You would have made a fine isolationist.” They maintain their disappointed gaze. “The cycle could end if everyone stops.”
“Look.” Ellie digs the tiny cube out of a pocket. “Ahdi said to present you with this.”
“I wouldn’t say you didn’t makeanyfriends. Do youunderstand what it means if I accept this cube from you? Ahdi has their enemies. From now on, they’ll be your enemies.”
“They tortured my mom. I need to understand why.”
They pluck the cube from Ellie’s palm. It sparkles and glitters between their fingers. Its internal folds twist and turn and the cube shifts from gray to brown to gray again as it catches the colors of the room. The Head Archivist peers at it closely and looks resigned. They squeeze and the cube disappears.
With a sigh, they take the paper they’d been writing on, fold it into a capsule, and launch it up one of the pneumatic tubes. The capsule swooshes as it flies up and over them.
“Well, that’s that then. I hope you’ve made the right choice, Ellie.” The cast of their bark is not unkind. “Change records are streaming in as we speak. You’ll have a chance to look at them as we sort and index. But, first, you are going to study the material we’ve collected on the abomination.”
“But we need to understand what they’re doing right now.” Daniel’s voice is an earthquake, more felt than heard.
