It was coming nearer, from the northwest, and it wasn’t alone. She could hear other engines: several high-pitched ones, and one that sounded a deeper, calmer note.
“She’s my patient,” Dr. Huxley said to Joanna. “My only duty is to her.”
“You know that’s not true, Dr. Huxley,” Joanna replied. “Your first duty is to your country, which is at war. Violation of that duty is called treason.”
Margaret took leave to wonder what all the other Joannas were like, even though she knew that it was a meaningless question. There were so many Joannas that they were like anything and everything. Somewhere, there must be Joannas who knew that they were not the only Joannas. Somewhere, there might be a Joanna who knew exactly what this Joanna was doing, and maybe even why. That Joanna would doubtless consider herself to be the wisest of all the Joannas, and her world the ultimate world of alclass="underline" the baseline of the entire multiverse… but she’d be wrong, because she couldn’t possibly be right. The multiverse was simply too big, too nearly infinite, to be based on any single way of thinking, any simple way of being. In the multiverse, everything that could be true had. to be true; only fools and madmen could ever hope to impose some tyranny of similarity upon its infinite variety.
“You have all the answers, don’t you?” Dr. Huxley said. “The war justifies everything you want to do, however cruel or crazy. The menace of Lu-dendorff licenses any mad whim that happens to cross your bureaucratic little mind. You don’t realize that you’ve already lost. Even if you win in the end, you’ve lost—because you’ve surrendered to the principle of the end justifying the means.”
“Get out of the car, Miss Lane,” Joanna said.
Margaret didn’t see why Joanna had to be so formal; she’d always called her Margaret before.
The cacophony that possessed the sky had become much louder now; the noise of the airplane engines was overlain by the mad chattering of machine-guns. As Margaret stepped out of the car she looked up into the dark sky, where not a single star shone through the clouds. She knew that the invisible stars were there, though: thousands upon thousands of them. She knew, too, that beyond the thousands that could be counted were millions more… and beyond them, billions. There was no end to the universe of stars save for that imposed upon it by the limits of human vision.
I don’t understand why my nearer selves are all screaming, Margaret thought, as she stared up at the smothering curtain of the dark, looking for the tiny pinpricks and threads of light that would be the Avros and the Sopwiths and the Spads and the Fokkers firing and firing and firing at one another with the aid of their brand new nightsights. Surely it can’t be like that for everyone who learns to see. Surely some of them must find that their nearest and dearest selves are happy and healthy and full of life.
The sky caught fire.
For a moment, Margaret thought that it really was the sky that was burning: that the entire vault of Heaven, with all its stars, seen and unseen, had begun to burn. Then she realized that the zeppelin that had been trying to slip back across the channel had been caught by its pursuers, and that its gargantuan gasbag had been breached by tracer-fire. The hydrogen in the envelope had ignited, and turned into a beautiful burning cloud.
Hydrogen, she knew, was lighter than air. The cloud would rise as it burned, heading toward infinity.
The envelope of the zeppelin, alas, was much heavier than air. It fell, along with the car and the engines, dragging terrible billows of fire down to the waiting earth.
Why, she wondered, is it always thus? It makes no sense. There’s no justice in it at all. But the multiverse is the multiverse; there’s no great litany of Harmony, nor could there ever be, no matter how we might desire it in our foolishness. There’s only chance and change, ebb and flow, birth and rebirth, extinction and creation, darkness and the light. There’s only everything.
Margaret didn’t panic when she realized where the debris would fall, and what the consequences of its fall would be. Dr. Huxley and Joanna were panicking, trying to run away even though they didn’t know which way to go, but Margaret stayed where she was, shrugging off the clawing hand that Dr. Huxley reached out to her, half-heartedly, as he turned to run. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what was about to happen to him, but that only added to his terror. The woman, on the other hand, had a slightly different glint in her eye, as if she could begin—but only just—to grasp the triviality as well as the enormity of it all.
Margaret, by contrast, knew exactly what it would be like to burn and to scream. She even knew what it would be like for that scream to echo across the dimensions, unsuspected by those who might escape to continue their petty betrayals and their stubborn defiance of all that was or ought to be sacred.
She knew, too, that in the furthest reaches of the multiverse, there were selves even stranger than the selves that were the stuff of legend. She knew that there were selves stranger than she could ever imagine, who were never in pain and never in danger, some of whom would never, ever die. They were not her like her at all, and yet they were her, and their great and infinite community could not be threatened by her own obliteration or the obliteration of a hundred thousand like her. This was not the immortality promised to her by the Church, but it was a kind of immortality worth knowing and worth savoring.
As the burning debris cascaded down upon them all, casually smashing the two running figures to the ground, Margaret thought that it did not matter, after all, whether there was any justice in the world or not. As her flesh melted on her bones, she took more comfort from that thought than she had ever known before, or had ever been likely to know.