But how do we get to the other universes? I’d asked Granddad once, when I was a kid.
We don’t, he’d said.
But why? I knew that the worlds we invented together were silly, but Granddad seemed to sincerely believe that other universes besides ours existed. If so, where were they, and how could I get there? I wanted to know so badly.
Because, he’d said. We were all made for one world, and one world only, Sasha. If universes were to collide, bad things would happen. They’re separate for a reason. At the time, I didn’t understand what he meant, but now I was starting to get it.
“Would you like to see the city?” Thomas asked. “It’s a clear night.”
“I’ve seen a city before, thanks,” I snapped. “How different could it be?”
“You’d be surprised,” he said, unshaken by my tone.
I inched closer to the window, taking care to maintain a distance between Thomas and me. He reached to the side and pressed a button I couldn’t see; the room went dark.
“You can see it better with the lights off,” he explained.
It took a second for my eyes to adjust, but when they did I saw it: a river of undulating green light high in the sky. If I needed any more proof that Juliana’s world, the one I saw when I slept, was real, this clinched it.
“I don’t understand,” I breathed. I was captivated by the glow of the aurora borealis, something I never imagined I’d see in person. It had always been my favorite part of the dreams. A feeling of calmness and relief flooded my body.
I had to tear my eyes away from it in order to assess the view from the window. We were more than a hundred stories up, which, aurora or not, made me feel wretched. I’d never been very good with heights; when my class had gone to visit the Sears Tower in the fourth grade, I’d had to stay inside one of the gift shops with a chaperone because I couldn’t bear standing so close to such a long, steep drop. The window spanned from floor to ceiling, making it seem like I could step out over the edge and plunge straight to the ground below. Just standing so close to such a terrifying precipice made my palms sweat and my heart race. I stayed far away from the glass and stared off into the distance.
We were towering over a star-shaped complex of squat, dark buildings, before which was a long, tree-filled park and, beyond that, a glittering city, spread like a blanket beneath our feet, an imprecise but lovely replica of the star-filled sky above our heads where the aurora danced and spun. Cars like insects moved through the streets below, which were laid out in a meticulous grid; elevated trains glided like eels above them, their steel roofs glinting in the moonlight. As far as I could see, we were standing in the tallest building for miles; none other even came close to half our height. The room was up so high that I could see the shadowy contours of the city, how it tapered to a point and ended on the shores of a placid river.
I heard a faint rustle of plastic and looked over to see Thomas pulling a handful of candies out of his pocket. He popped them in his mouth one by one and chewed them in a slow, rhythmic fashion that by the fourth or fifth time was pretty much annoying the crap out of me.
“You’re eating right now?” Once I said that, I realized that I was starving.
He fished the entire bag out of his pocket and offered it to me. “Want one?”
I eyed them suspiciously. “What are they?”
“Toggles,” he said. “They’re chocolate with fruit jelly in the middle. Red’s strawberry, purple is raspberry, blue’s watermelon, although I’ve never seen a blue watermelon in my life so I’m not sure where they get off—”
“No thanks,” I interrupted. “That sounds disgusting. Plus, I’m allergic to chocolate.”
“You are?”
“What? You don’t have my medical records taped up somewhere in here?”
His eyes skimmed over the paper-covered walls. “I thought I did. …”
“Forget it. Just stop talking to me.”
I turned my attention back to the cityscape below. It’s an island, I thought in passing. But where? I’d assumed we were in North America, but if the aurora was in the sky, we had to be somewhere very far north. The aurora was … there were no words for what it was. “Beautiful” felt used up, meaningless. The way the green waves moved through the indigo sky called to my mind the weightless grace of ballet dancers, the spreading of ink through water, the way ribbons spun in a breeze. It was mesmerizing, and as I watched it fatigue began to settle over me. It was hard to believe that a place that contained something so amazing as the aurora could also be my prison, but Earth had the aurora, too, and possessed countless horrors of its own.
“Manhattan,” Thomas told me. I bit my lip in frustration. When the General was giving me my marching orders, Thomas hadn’t said a word; now, he seemed incapable of staying silent.
“This can’t be Manhattan,” I protested, realizing I was going to have to talk to him since I was stuck with him for the next six days. “New York is too far south to see the aurora borealis.”
“That’s not the aurora borealis. It’s the aurora universalis.” He swiped a finger across the length of the sky, not quite touching the glass. “You can see it everywhere here. That’s how the planet got its name. It’s one of the differences.” He looked over at me, as if trying to judge how this information was landing. “And I never said this was New York.”
“But Manhattan is part of New York,” I pointed out, although as soon as the words were out of my mouth I realized I was being a little dim. This wasn’t Earth; I couldn’t expect everything to be the same.
“Not here. Like the General said, this is Columbia City. It used to be New York, a long time ago, but they changed the name when the split from England was final, as a kind of symbolic act.”
“What do you mean ‘one of the differences’?”
“Your planet—Earth—and this planet—Aurora—are analogs,” he said. That word again, I thought. Analog.
“Why do you call them that? If they’re doubles, then why don’t you just say ‘double’?”
“Because ‘double’ is an imprecise term,” he said. He sounded like he was quoting someone, the words not quite his own. “A double is an exact copy, with absolutely no differences. An analog can be a double, but it doesn’t have to be; analogs can be different in some ways, large or small, but still similar, if that makes any sense.”
“Um, not really. How can something be the same, but also sometimes different?”
“Well, take this, for example,” he said, gesturing toward the view from the window. “Earth and Aurora are essentially the same planet: same mass, same orbit, same axis, same natural surface geography. The only thing that makes Aurora special is that its magnetic field is two and a half times that of Earth’s. That’s why you can see the lights so far south. You see? They’re similar, but not the same. Equivalent is probably the best word. Essentially equal, but not identical.”
“Is that why you look like Grant but your name is Thomas?”
He nodded. “And why you look like Princess Juliana but you have a different identity. Not copies. Not twins. Not look-alikes. Analogs.”
“Analogs,” I repeated. “But why?”
“Why?” He appeared genuinely confused by the question.