Editor’s note: This is the final installment in a 15-part serialized mystery by Oakland’s Robin Sloan. Catch up on any chapters you’ve missed at www.mercurynews.com/tag/the-strange-case-of-the-new-golden-gate/.
CHAPTER 15: Best of All Possible
The New Golden Gate had been activated ahead of schedule. Designed to merge all possible Bay Areas into one, it had instead … well, I had no idea what it had done.
I had come unstuck between worlds.
I saw Chander and Lois’s bay, which they called Bay One, where San Francisco’s skyline rippled with wealth and tent cities bloomed beneath the highways.
I saw a bay where the big city had sprouted on the north side of the Golden Gate, a dark smoking metropolis called Novaya Ross.
I saw a bay that flew the flag of the California Republic, a rich city-state, great lever of power in the Pacific Rim, seething with the spies of a dozen nations, all scrambling for some advantage.
I saw a bay where the Ohlone still inhabited the eastern shore, feasting on salmon and acorns and oysters, living some of the all-time great human lives. Their shellmounds grew and grew and grew.
I saw a bay where San Francisco lay in ruins, irradiated, the headquarters of the United Nations a blackened shell.
I saw a bay where BART ran all the way to Santa Rosa; I saw a bay where sky-taquerias floated serenely above; I saw a bay where everyone had a home.
I saw a bay from which a monster rose, dark as the water, inchoate as fog. It was no invader; it had been there from the beginning. It was spiteful and jealous, a dragon guarding its hoard against thieves, against life, against change, but a figure opposed it, a warrior, her head circled in flame —
I saw a bay — I was the bay — I was lost —
Then, I felt myself being reeled in, a fish on a line, dragged back through the worlds I’d traversed, a kaleidoscope of possibilities, until I landed with a wet slap on the floor of the sea witch Carlotta’s cabin on the coast.
My clothes clung to my skin, completely soaked. I took my bearings. I was laid out prone inside a strange outline, a complicated knot, its border drawn with strips of seaweed. What had happened?
“Don’t ask me,” Carlotta said. “I just harvest seaweed and fight the occasional demon. But I felt your peril, you and Annabel both, so I made these” — she indicated the shapes on the floor — “as quickly as I could.”
Shapes, plural. There was a knot for Annabel Scheme, but it was empty.
The New Golden Gate hadn’t worked. Carlotta’s cabin was still here. My whole world was still here. Crowded cities still rose on the bay we’d filled. Where, though, was Scheme?
It took me weeks, working on my own, to piece together what had happened. When Vacal Chander slammed the switch to activate his New Golden Gate, it did not collapse all possible Bay Areas into one. It did, however, fling everyone unlucky enough to be inside out into the cosmos. I would have landed in an alien timeline if not for Carlotta’s silver thread.
After repairing the facility’s damaged control room, we learned that not all of its peers had gone offline; not all of the other Bay Areas had found Quintessandra’s songs so compelling. There are 16 still operational. If that number becomes 17, then Chander and Lois, wherever they are, will be able to complete their grand design.
So it comes down to one world, and we don’t know which one. We have no way of traveling between them, but the transmitter works. Quintessandra hosts nightly broadcasts, sometimes singing, sometimes just chatting: The first pop star with fans in multiple realities.
I’m worried it’s not enough. That’s why I’ve written this down, and why I will soon send it through the transmitter. Maybe you’ll find it on your world’s internet. Maybe you’ll read it in a newspaper. (Does your world still have newspapers?)
I think that Quintessandra, for all her genius, is not actually the best person my Bay Area ever produced. I think that distinction belongs to someone else.
Here’s why I’ve told you all this.
Now you’ll know Scheme if you meet her. She might look a little different. She might be acting strange. But then again, she might be exactly the same, with bright red hair and a taste for pickup trucks. If you meet her, say:
“Annabel Scheme? What the yerb kind of name is that?”
This will be the signal that you know who she is, what world she’s from. Say it — but then, before she can answer, interrupt, and tell her that Will and Quintessandra and Carlotta all miss her.
Tell her we’re going to bring her home.
THE END
