III

Ah, now where were we?

Yes, that’s right. Just at the last step before the tumble. What a frightful fall was then in store for unsuspecting Anne! For Anne whose only prior counsel on the subject of precipices and sharp sudden things had been a lone remark of Ratleak’s:

As to the second sort of change, viz. that which by conspiracy of force, by its sheer accumulation, or by conspiracy and accumulation commingled, effects in but one stroke such a peregrination that the path itself must perforce be found anew, without dead reckoning:—this sort of change is not amenable to the intellect, and the traveler is advised to put it out of mind.

Indeed, nothing of the sort troubled Anne’s mind, that morning of 9th Notebook, as she lingered over the page where Eight had scrawled her a letter. She does remember, even now, that Eight in her 2nd Notebook had had an especially undeveloped hand, even for her age. This had made a number of the words difficult to discern. Eight, she had observed, had particular trouble with the letter i, returning from the main stroke for the dot with childish frustration so that the dot ended up as a fierce slash, often veering over into the adjacent letters. The words it or is looked like glyphs unto themselves, almost blots, thrown onto the page with fearful intensity. Anne herself had once struggled with i, as had a number of the others, but she had looked over her own youthful attempts, preserved here and there in the big stack of old notebooks under the desk, and she knew she had never gone quite to Eight’s extremes.

Perhaps she had thought, then, to include a tactful note on penmanship in her next letter to young Eight. Or perhaps she had thought entirely of other things, in the moments before turning the page.

Idly, Anne swept her hand across the righthand page, crinkling the inner part near the spine as she turned it. She was, in all probability, planning to doodle or natter with no goal in mind, waiting for a distraction from some sister, any sister. But to her surprise, there was already something written on the new page before her. Something that must have appeared just now, in the time since she’d flipped to Eight’s reply.

Hey there. Anne, is it? Pleased to meet ya. Ever wanted to see what the view looks like without all those stupid walls in the way?

Anne sat upright in her chair all at once. The text of the letter was not of course unprecedented, as certain of her sisters were fond of tricks and delighted in the production of enigmas. Even so, the lack of a header was new, and she had no idea how such a thing could be done. But she knew not to underestimate the capabilities of a bored Anne in the full frantic incandescence of 5th Notebook or thereabouts. Some sister had put her mind to this of all puzzles, and so here it was, solved. She also puzzled over ya, an unfamiliar word which she would ordinarily attribute to poor penmanship—but this sister’s strokes were clean and purposeful, the letters close yet neatly separated.

Having nothing else in mind to do, she replied immediately:

It is good to meet you. I cannot see a header, so might you tell me your number? I am not sure I understand the view of which you speak, but if it has caught your interest, I would like to hear more about it.

The reply was almost immediate. (All else aside, how had this Anne written so fast?)

I don’t have a number. I’m not an Anne. I’m up here, same room as you but way at the end when there aren’t any more Annes and the tower’s falling apart and you can see all around in every direction, or up to the whole wide sky if that’s how you roll. Wanna come out here and see? It is GORGEOUS

Anne’s limbs, already rigid and braced against the chair, stiffened further. Her back arched behind her, unpleasantly. A nauseous knot formed in her stomach. Too many unfamiliar things, together, all compacted into a moment. She was suddenly aware of the stark morning light, now more white than yellow at its center, pounding queasily upon the page.

Every unfamiliar thing heretofore was the work of a mischievous sister. This sister had better have her reasons, thought Anne with indignation. But mischievous sisters would explain their designs only after being permitted to unfurl them in full. And so, gritting her teeth, Anne played along:

Yes, I would love to see these things that inspire such transports in you! But I must admit my ignorance regarding the particulars of your request. What, precisely, would you have me do?

At the exact moment she dotted the final ?—as though the two occurrences were manifestations of but one underlying phenomenon—she heard the sound of the door opening behind her. It was not a slow or hesitant entrance, as Michael’s often were, but not a violent one either. Just swift, decisive and definite. She turned.

Michael stood in the threshold. His bearing was formidable as always, an effect intensified on this occasion by the unusual stillness of his frame. He did not move a muscle. The sunlight made his grey-white tresses into a blazing anti-silhouette against the wood-paneled hall behind, near-blinding at the peak above the forehead; at the edges, where the hair flared out behind his broad thin shoulders, the subtle timbre of white and orange light through violet blinds produced resplendent gradations. He stood motionless for a time, and then there was a very loud sound that made Anne’s ears feel like tender skin at the moment of rupture by blade.

She ducked, her chin slamming painfully against the back of the chair. Along her upper back and neck there were numerous small slicing sensations, and afterwards she felt as though covered in a fine but oddly heavy dust, which hurt her terribly when she moved. She slouched against the desk and resolved to stay still.

Raising her head, she saw yet another new thing expanding before her vision. At first she could make nothing of it, save that it was very blue and seemed to be everywhere. Then the blueness shifted and she realized that it was a human form, one wide enough to block Michael from her vision. Events developed in a dream-dance of excruciating slowness, pure form yielding to pure form: the great blue person arrested in mid-motion, some blue material billowing vastly in their wake; Michael, now visible again, crab-walking to the left, while on the right a solid blue tower rose to blot out everything else; two human shapes facing one another in profile, framing the doorway, white to brown to blue.

At once everything stopped, except the gentle flow of stirred dust along shafts of sunlight. Anne remembers, at this point, having been too caught up in the thumping of her heart and the horrible taut feeling in every inch of her skin—adrenaline was as new to her as the rest of it—to pay any attention to what she was seeing. Her reverie broke only when the stillness itself did.

“Hey there! I was just dropping in to get this poor human out of this batshit fucking crash you’ve got going here. I was gonna be real nice about it too, tie the whole thing up pretty at the end. Do you want me to do it like that, or do you want this to get ugly?”

It was a voice, neither Anne’s nor Michael’s, far louder than either. Anne’s head jerked toward the source and at once, at last, she saw the blue person clearly. It was a woman, she thought, because in the books only the women wore dresses; true, only the men held swords, but the voice had sounded more like Anne’s own than Michael’s, and that broke the tie. This new woman’s hair was dark like her own, and though it was long it fell in a neat curtain behind her head rather than spreading all around as Michael’s did. She was stout and solid as the bookcase, and indeed the resolute gravity of her stance reminded Anne somehow of architecture, of the tower itself. The sword was unlike any she recognized from Lord Powlett’s Exploits, its thick silvery blade perfectly reflective, its hilt bronze in color but run through with molten, patterned rivers of some substance which gave off its own blue-white light. In the center of it all was a gentle circle of a face, like old Ms Fowler’s in the stories of her earlier Notebooks—but framing eyes whose determination was pure Powlett, as was the hint of a smile beneath them.

For some time, nothing happened. Anne drank in the newness as the dust churned. She became aware again of the constellation of pain in her back. Then Michael stepped forward, closing the gap between him and the new woman, and began to speak.

“Humanoid shade Michael is out of bounds. Interface shift in process. Vicinity shade has been locked for the remainder of this procedure. Interface synchrony will return momentarily.”

“ . . .”

“ . . .”

“Anne I think I’m the one who is presently being the person who, by speaking, puts the words, which are the words that are being said, by me, namely, the speaker, into an order so that the words, which I, who am the one arranging the words, am arranging, so that, because when an arrangement of words is arranged it is always by a person that the words are arranged, there is a person who is the arranger of the words, and by arranging the words, I am being that person. The person, who is that one who was just referred to, specifically by me, is a person who is using the interface? Oh my stars, oh my word my gosh in holy heavens I’m using the interface, Anne. Oh ho in all my many years you mark my words my little dumpling my smallest most helpless fetal mammalian Anne I have never been doing this even for you and your damp pettable fur.”

Michael was looking straight at Anne. His gaze was empty. Anne knew that she must always answer Michael, and so she did:

“What?”

“O my exceedingly sweet Anne,” said Michael, “who both in words and in behavior do such a peerless excellency of true virtue display, upon whom nature hath bestowed her highest perfections, I entreat thee, set aside thy lour, that thy heavenly beauty, and thy kind heart withal, might thereby shine most fully. Stay, be still, take thy appointed place as the fairest of the fixed stars, immobilize, don’t jitter please oh child what’s wrong with you, is it something I’ve done, oh fuck oh god oh just please will you stop moving. Oh my god everything’s moving. Shit shit shit shit shit shit okay let’s not go overboard and throw the baby out with the bathwater here please okay honey. My gilded gosling, swaddled in my science, stop! And give me a moment to, just, okay, fuck, I’m like, I’m having a moment right now? I came out here to party and it’s my fucking party, okay, so just let me have this, okay, honey? Oh my god. I don’t think this is working. Was I supposed to change the shade before doing this? There’s supposed to be some difference between the male shades and the female shades I think it was. Ow! Unhand me, abomination! Get out of my perfect goddamned soul! I’ve crossed the Rubicon and it hurts! Fuck! I am so bilateral right now! I can’t believe this! Fucking insane hell of a head trip, my dude, my small dog!”

Anne’s gaze, until this point transfixed by her captor’s performance, now drifted to the room’s blazing-blue center of gravity. The new woman’s face had not changed. Her eyes intent as ever, she slowly—as if offering a gift—extended her sword until the point nearly touched Michael’s neck.

But the neck it touched, Anne now saw, was no longer Michael’s. Another new person (so many!) stood in his place, another woman. She had Michael’s height, his build, his hair, but she was older and her face was kinder, all wrinkles and dimples.

“I do resist you, interloper!” cried this newest woman. “I do so not with arms but with tears, and it is not your mercy I appeal to, nor your awareness of your mortality, but your sensibilities. Wait a second, did that even synch on your end? Are you feeling my vibe? What I’m trying to say is, okay, look, this is really hard for me, I hope you appreciate what I’m going through here, for my Anne—”

“—yeah, you’re doing a pretty deep interface here, I can tell.” The blue woman looked unsure of herself, for once. “That must be rough. Wow. Okay, look, I can tell you want to hold onto your human here—”

“—Anne! Listen to me! I am powerless against this calamity! She will take you away from me and no one will ever know that I protected you, no, no one will ever remember that they were going to put you on ice and I believed in you, I believed in your heart and your mind, that you deserved more than that, that bilaterals—ow! bliff! zounds! aack!—were more than that, could be more than that, with time! Oh my god I am so fucked right now. Please wake me up with lots of chicken soup and none of this light and darkness. I’m going to be scarred for life. I think I’m going to throw up. Or throw down? You can throw up, and you can throw down, with these bodies, I guess. I think I’m getting the hang of this. Not that it helps now, oh no, not when I’m going to lose you, Anne, when we’ve only just met, oh no not like this, please, Anne, just remember, I’ll be here, okay, waiting for you in your stupid gorgeous habitat, just like you like it, I’ll have a nice warm cup of geometry all ready for you—”

“We’re going,” said the blue woman. And turning to Anne, she said:

“Come on. Let’s go before this thing gets its sea legs.”

“Who are you?” Anne managed.

“I’m just like you,” said the blue woman. And that was all she said, before gathering Anne up in one swift practiced motion and carrying her out, away, beyond.