A man and woman gazed out at them, their hands lightly touching as they stood in a flowering garden. A young girl sat between them in the grass, hugging a ball in her lap. They stared at the painter who had captured them, stared, without being entirely aware of it, into the future Selene occupied. Selene stared back, trying to peer into that past.
“Is that all we once were?” said Ursula, as the canvas spun again to her. “They look trapped in their flesh. Except for size, they look almost exactly the same.”
“For them,” said Selene, “that was difference enough.”
“At least, that’s what they had to keep telling themselves,” said Tomas.
“Come along, Tomas,” said Ursula. “Let’s give Selene and Karl some time alone.”
Ursula climbed back out the way they had come. As the painting dropped against a wall, Selene hoped, but could never be quite sure, that Tomas had followed his wife. After a moment, Selene could hear the slamming together of great objects. She smiled.
“I hope Ursula is having fun,” said Karl.
“Some people just know better than others how, I guess,” said Selene.
Selene and Karl and Karl and Karl made their way through what remained of the museum, where she tried to feel as a long-ago tourist might have, visiting on a summer day for a break from her busy life. She imagined how it must once have looked with its walls arranged neatly, its paintings organized according to a lost scheme Selene could not comprehend, its halls populated by contemporary visitors in search of a mirror. Selene lifted up each painting as lovingly as would a mother a child, and found each a place amidst the ruins where it could be seen and perhaps understood. She had no desire for blotches or geometric patterns today, though, and when Karl would overturn anything reeking of the abstract, she quickly abandoned it. She needed only the representational today. She needed . . . life.
A great fish, trapped at the end of a line, frozen in midair, yanked toward a small rowboat. A bowl of fruit that was only a bowl of fruit, and nothing more. A dog, its fur sparkling, proudly posing with a limp duck hanging from its maw. And the faces of the people, the endless faces of the people.
She mostly studied their eyes. They did not look unhappy to her. They did not look discontented. She was not fooled into thinking that their lives as they lived them were perfect; no, she was too smart for that, but she knew that what problems they had were not just symptoms of their times. They did not seem enslaved by the paucity of their choices. In fact, they were probably just as bewildered by the multiplicity of them as she was by her own.
“Selene,” said Karl. Her name startled her. She lost hold of the last painting she had been studying, and Karl and Karl had to stumble forward to catch it. “Sorry. But Selene—what are you looking for?”
“I don’t know.”
She studied her husband’s faces over the frame that was between them. Their eyes were equally sincere.
“What’s wrong?” asked Karl.
“I don’t know that either.”
Karl tugged at the frame that separated them, but Selene held it in place. Karl stepped back and left them like that, coming around to place a hand on the small of Selene’s back.
“Selene,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“I can’t,” she said.
“We can’t stay here forever,” he said.
“Can’t we?”
A deafening crash thudded outside. Selene could feel the vibrations through the soles of her feet.
“Obviously not if we want this world to remain in one piece,” said Karl, smiling.
When they climbed back outside, the front of the museum was entirely clear of debris. Ursula stood in the midst of several perfectly balanced columns of wreckage.
“Much better that way, don’t you think?” said Ursula. “And I could use the exercise.”
“You don’t need any exercise,” said Selene.
“You must stop being so literal,” said Tomas.
“Where have you been, dear?” asked Ursula.
“Everywhere,” said Tomas. “I’ve seen it all now.”
“All?” asked Selene.
“Yes,” said Tomas. “The museum. The city. The world. Is it time for us to go?”
“There’s much more the rest of us still have to see,” said Selene. “Go back and take a second look. It isn’t our fault that you can see everything so much faster than we do.”
“Actually,” said Tomas. “It is.”
“Tomas!” shouted Selene. She wished she had the ability to tell whether her sudden anger was a good thing or a bad thing.
“Don’t bother,” said Ursula. “He’s gone again.”
“How can you tell?”
Ursula shrugged, her shoulders clinking. Selene sighed.
They walked single file through the rubble, first Selene, then Karl, then Karl, then Karl, then Ursula, this time, none of them touching. At a building where Selene recalled a movie theater once had been, she stopped. There’d been tuxedos there on the screen, she remembered. Tuxedos and dancing. But now the marquee was fallen, blending with the broken concrete of the sidewalk to block their way. Ursula pushed through to center of the mound and effortlessly lifted a girder over her head.
“No!” Karl shouted.
“That’s right,” said Karl. “Put that down.”
“Yes,” said Karl. “The old-fashioned way. Selene wants this done the old-fashioned way.”
“If you insist,” said Ursula, lowering the girder slowly and moving back beside her friend.
Karl dove into the pile, squeezing through the narrow path that Ursula had started. Karl tossed a small chunk of brick and concrete to Karl, who flung it on to Karl, who grunted as he caught it and then stepped outside the field of rubble to lay the clump at Selene’s feet.
“A gift,” said Karl. “A gift of the old-fashioned way.”
Selene laughed.
“Good,” called out Karl, from where he continued to work. “You keep doing that.”
“There hasn’t been enough of it lately,” shouted Karl, struggling next to him.
Karl bounded away to rejoin himself within the forest of brick and metal and glass and continued widening the path. Pulling away the wreckage that barred the door, the three of him passed the rubble among himself like the hands of a juggler, and Selene laughed yet again, at her husband’s playful love and at the sight of the entrance that she’d been remembering with such hope.
Karl bowed on the left, and Karl bowed on the right, and Karl waved her forward, and Selene responded with a curtsy, as she had seen the native Earthlings do in those movies made so long ago.
Then, before she could step forward to entwine her husband’s arms with her own and go inside, she heard a deep rumbling as loud as the death of stars.
The pavement cracked open in front of Selene, and her husband dropped away and vanished into the crevasse. Before Selene could move, the front wall of the theater spilled forward, sliding into the hole after Karl and Karl and Karl. From the ragged split smoke and ash plumed upward, blinding her. She screamed, but no sound came out, her throat clogged by a harsh dust.
Ursula dove forward into the chasm, pushing debris aside and hurling rubble out of sight into the distance. Tomas returned, bringing a wind that blew the clouds of dust away. As soon as Selene could see her way clear, she stumbled down the lip of the pit to stand beside Ursula.
“Selene, you shouldn’t be here. It’s much too dangerous.”
“Where is he? Where’s my husband?”
“Selene, you don’t want to see this,” said Tomas. She could feel Tomas surrounding her, beginning to lift her, and as she started to be wafted away, she shrugged him off.
“Leave me be!” she said, as she saw limbs, ghostly with dust, protruding from beneath the rubble. “Karl!”
As Ursula removed the last bits of debris that were keeping Karl’s broken bodies hidden, Selene threw herself alongside him and started to howl.
“This can’t be,” she muttered, when speech finally returned. “This is impossible. He’s dead. All of him is dead.”
“I don’t think I can remember anyone ever dying,” said Tomas.
As Selene rocked and moaned, Ursula grew once more into a larger self and cupped her friends in her hands. This time, Selene did not object as Ursula cradled them all and returned them to the flitter. Kneeling, Ursula carefully placed them inside the flitter as if arranging the figures in a doll’s house. A chair rose up to greet Selene, but no pallet responded to support any of Karl’s bodies until Ursula waved her shrinking hand across the floor.
“It can’t be over so easily,” said Selene. “Not now. Not today. This isn’t how it was supposed to be.”
She moved from body to body, touching a bruised cheek here, flattening out a curl of hair there. As she traced a deep gouge in one of Karl’s legs, terror welled within her, terror that was then tamped down. She didn’t know what would happen if she was allowed to feel such pain.
“There’s nothing we can do,” said Ursula, moving to her friend’s side. Ursula’s fingers felt colder on her arm than they ever had before. “We should leave here, Selene. Don’t you think?”
“Selene?” said Tomas.
Selene could not speak. Was there anyone left who needed to hear her voice? She did not think so.
“Let’s just go, Selene,” said Ursula, as softly as she could. “There’s nothing more for us here.”
Selene could feel her friend’s fingers in her hair, and she did not want to feel them.
“Go?” said Selene, struggling to keep her voice from cracking with rage. “Why should I go? Why should I go back home now? There’s no reason to do anything any longer, no reason to come here and no reason to go back. If only I hadn’t made us come here! If only I hadn’t insisted
all
of him come here. Leave me. You go back. Just leave me.”
“Why
did
you want to come here, Selene?” asked Ursula. “What was the reason? What was it all about?”
Selene looked at her husband and her husband and her husband. She stroked his smooth face and his bruised face and then had to turn away from where there was hardly any face left at all. They’d begun their day in love and ended it in death, and love would not come again.
“What was the reason?” Selene whispered. “What
was
the reason?”
It had seemed so important, back when she woke on the other side of the galaxy. Earth, and all it represented, was more than just a goal, it was the journey as well, and it had seemed dreadfully important. And now . . . now nothing was important.
“You’re right,” said Selene. “Let’s go back. Let’s go back now, and let’s go back fast. And let’s not talk anymore of the old-fashioned way.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying all along,” said Tomas.
And as swift as the thought, Earth was gone, with no sense of a trip having been made. Selene, when she could bear to look out again through the transparent flitter walls, could see that they had arrived back outside her dome. It appeared exactly as they had left it that morning, in a prior dawn that was light-years away. She looked from the dome to her husband and back, with no idea how she could ever live in one without the other again. She would have to have the dome destroyed.
Later, after Tomas and Ursula left her alone, perhaps she would have herself destroyed as well.
But before Selene could think the dome away, a figure pressed toward her through the membrane of its walls, and as a shell tightened around the approaching form, she could see that it was Karl. She struggled to cry out, but her mind was too numb to speak before he did.
“What happened?” he asked, as he ran inside the flitter and embraced his wife while surrounded by his own dead bodies. “One moment I was clearing a path for you, and the next . . . nothing. I was cut off.”
“How can you be alive?” she whispered, cradling his head in her hands. “The building fell and crushed you, all of you. . . .”
“I was going to tell you,” said Karl, “but I figured that if there could be three of me, darling, why not four? There was so much work to be done around here, and I knew that once I explained, you wouldn’t really mind.”
“You bastard!” she shouted, and pushed him away. “How long has this been going on?”
“Only since the moment you left. As Ursula launched you all into space, I launched a new me down here.”
“But I wanted to see Earth with you at my side. I
needed
to see Earth with you at my side! How could you choose to stay behind and miss that? How could you live without me? I thought you loved me!”
“But I
saw
Earth with you, Selene. I was never without you. I was there the entire time.”
“I could kill you,” said Selene, slapping at Karl through the tears.
“If you’re going to do that,” said Karl, letting her succeed in striking him a few times before catching her hands, “I’d better make sure that there are a few more of me first.”
He drew her close with a single pair of arms and kissed her. Her knees buckled, and she crumpled at his feet, sobbing, laughing, howling, giggling, her emotions in full revolt against her senses.