Reality School In The Entropy Zone Part 3

I wail into the darkness, "Help me, please!" and my cry is wrapped in silence.

And yet...

I sense Lisa's presence, not fleeing to the candle and safety, but returning for me. "Go!" I scream. "Go to him before it's too late! d.a.m.n you, go!" And suddenly my anger disintegrates, and I find myself shuddering with pain, and crying to Lisa to save herself, and this time I mean it without any anger at all.

Lisa, go! Why do you think I did this?

In that moment, the distant light flares brighter, reclaiming power from the darkness. Light and darkness clash in a fury. The energies of chaos flail about me, defying the light's power to reclaim me. But I have made my peace. My anger is gone, my battle is won...and it is the chaos fighting the rearguard battle. The darkness begins to shrink, hissing.

And I hear Lisa's voice whispering, "Come back to the light, Alexandri, come back to the light. You are a shaper...we can shape together..."

And the light blooms around us both.

It is a breathtaking sight, the flattening out of the entropic fold like an enormous soap bubble. I can see the candle, with its light and all of its faces, slowly distorting with the refraction, trans.m.u.ting into a crazy, stretched-taffy image. The singing changes, brightening into strange and beautiful harmonies.

And around me, I hear the hiss of Chaos fading...and I hear Lisa calling me, and Danny.

Whatever I have done, I am not the only one. I hear other voices of grat.i.tude...other victories claimed alongside mine. I watch as the memories cl.u.s.tered in the air above the candle slowly come together, like a backwards explosion. And the entropic fold flattens and vanishes...

"Lisa?" I murmured, blinking, feeling the gra.s.s under me. I looked around, stunned by the bright sunlight on the playground, the sky so blue it made my eyes ache, the whisper of a breeze cooling my face.

"Alexandra!" she cried. "You're safe! Thank G.o.d!" I gazed at her in wonderment, but before I could ask what she remembered happening, she threw herself into my arms, and we hugged and cried like grown women, like best friends who had not seen each other in years. And then we turned and wept with Danny, and Roberta, and Judy...and we all ran laughing across the school yard to see who else had returned.

Most of us made it back, but not all. We never saw Ashok again, or Lottie, or Harvey, or Mr. Playstead, or Miss Jennings. Mr. Tea and Mrs. Randolph were here when we returned, and a couple of the counselors. But none of the graduate shapers.

Why? We have no idea.

I'm sometimes asked if that is fair. And I ask in return, what does fair have to do with war? We waged war against Chaos and we won. But those people were casualties. And there will undoubtedly be more casualties, the next time we have to wage this war. And we will: we have not eliminated entropy from the universe, though we seem to have closed this rift. Is there still a micro-singularity floating out there somewhere, waiting to cause more mischief? No one knows. And so we vow to maintain our watch.

How many others vanished from the Earth that we don't know of? I can't even guess. I find myself wondering sometimes: didn't I have a younger brother once, in another reality? Marie doesn't remember, nor do my parents; but they don't have my perspective, either. Everything to them is as they think it was.

How much has the Earth itself changed? The sun seems a little cooler. I know that the political climate is different; I remember living in a nation called "the United States of..." I cannot seem to remember the rest of the name. I dream sometimes of orbiting s.p.a.ce stations glinting in the night sky, and I think perhaps it is more than just a dream. But we have not yet gone into s.p.a.ce, and the sky is full of stars, and the two moons, but no s.p.a.ceships.

Variable persistence of memory. I feel my own memories slowly slipping and blurring, and I wonder-- will these words, tomorrow, accurately reflect reality as it is then?

I can only guess at my parents' feelings at seeing their child a grown adult--and not just an adult, but an adult tempered by fire. A soldier. I am physically and emotionally almost their age, perhaps even older in some ways, and they don't quite understand why. But with Lisa and some of the others, I sit on the oversight committee of the Reality School, training those who will follow us in maintaining the integrity of our existence.

And I ask myself: What qualifies me for this job? What qualifies any of us to decide what reality is the real, or right, one?

I wonder who I have become, and I think of a little girl who rode a fusion-powered turbocruiser into the school yard not so long ago, jumping up and down with glee.

That was only a few months ago, wasn't it?

A few months ago...by the calendar.

An eternity.