Nano 3

‘I still think you look funny.’ Laurel screwed up her eyes and scrutinized Art suspiciously. ‘Your arms are too skinny.’

‘Yeah well, you’re an irritating little girl,’ he said, smiling weakly. ‘Don’t you have to go to school or something?’

‘It’s harvest. We don’t go to school then. Everybody knows that,’ Laurel said, smirking. ‘Do you have subnormal intelligence?’

‘No Laurel.’ Art stood up, brushing earth and dead grass off his trousers. ‘I happen to have perfectly normal intelligence, thank you, and in addition, I have normal social skills too, unlike some people around here.’

‘Are you talking about me?’ Laurel asked solemnly. ‘I want to check that you meant me. Mistakes are easily made when words are misinterpreted, you know.’

‘Oh – for – shut up!’ Art turned to face the girl, who gazed back with calm gravity. ‘What do you want to know anyway? I’m here, I’m staying, so leave me alone!’

‘I suppose it’s because I have some theories about you.’ Laurel tilted her head at an angle, her prim little plaits falling past her shoulders just so, the perfect picture of a perfect little girl. ‘You know, I have this...hunch...that you aren’t from here.’

‘Of course I’m not from here,’ he snapped. ‘I don’t know this place, like duh.’

‘No, what I meant was, I think that you aren’t from this world at all.’

He bit his lip painfully and dropped back onto the ground beside the girl. ‘What do you mean, not from this world?’

‘I’ve been reading,’ Laurel said, smoothing her skirt over scabby knees. ‘And there have been some theories – or you can call them hypotheses – that worlds other than the one we know do exist, but outside our time and space. I suppose you can call these places alternate universes, but the term would be grossly inaccurate, strictly speaking.’

‘So? What’s that got to do with me?’

‘You see,’ Laurel went on, in the patient tone usually adopted by mothers when they are vainly trying to explain to screaming brats that a dropped ice-cream cone isn’t the end of the world, ‘there have also been theories that it is possible for us – for anyone – to travel between these worlds. They exist side by side, but not, as I have said, sharing the same space and time with each other. There have been some theorists who said...’

‘Yeah?’

‘They have even said that these worlds might have been caused by magic,’ the girl whispered. ‘Can you believe anything so utterly ridiculous? Magic? I mean, it has been proven that an unknown force or energy exists, something we call thaumic energy, but these theorists are beginnning to talk of calling it magic, how unbelievable – ‘

‘Wait wait, stop. Hold it there. Are you telling me that alternate worlds actually exist?’

‘I just said there were theories,’ Laurel said, frowning. ‘But what I still don’t get is – ‘

‘Right, right, let’s leave whatever the stupid theorists said for the moment. Has anyone proven the existence of these worlds? How can we know they’re there?’

‘Well, see, it all started when theorists began noticing fluctuations in energy within strictly controlled experiments. I mean, when you light a bulb using a single cell, you expect the bulb to just light up, right? But five times out of ten, the bulb would explode whenever the theorists did the experiment, or the light would come out blue, or red, or any colour of the rainbow even. So the theorists started investigating, obviously, and identified a new energy which existed all around us. The energy is weak in its natural state, because you would have noticed, lightbulbs don’t explode for no reason, right? So anyway, they decided to name this energy “thaumic energy”, but they still have no idea what it does, or what we can use it for. They think, though, that the effects of this energy can only be observed when there are no other energies present to interfere, or not too much anyway.’ Laurel drew a deep happy breath and sighed. ‘Fascinating, isn’t it?’

‘Er. I was talking about alternate worlds, not thaumic energy,’ Art pointed out. ‘But never mind, do go on. I’ve never heard of thaumic energy before.’

‘It’s just been recently discovered, and only the scientific and theoretical communities pay any attention to it,’ Laurel said smugly. ‘I’ve been following developments regularly.’

‘Yeah yeah,’ Art said, amused. The girl was only seven, granted, and she had rubbish social skills, but at least she wasn’t whiny or deliberately cutesy.

‘Well,’ Laurel continued, hooking her hands around a knee, ‘some theorists – not all, because there’s no concrete proof, or even anything to back up the hypothesis – think that thaumic energy can be manipulated and strengthened in some way to create whole new worlds. Someone claims to have done that already; he said that he created a miniature universe in its most basic form within a beaker, but no one else has seen it yet. He’s going to publish a report soon, but I wouldn’t bet on it convincing anyone for the moment. Most scientists still stick to the old traditional facts anyway, and nearly all the theorists are either slightly insane or poor misunderstood geniuses nobody cares to listen to.’

‘Oh my,’ Art said. He was slightly staggered with the facts Laurel had spouted effortlessly. One: this girl was smart in a scary way. Two: why did the idea of alternate worlds set off something odd in him? There was a nagging feeling in his mind somewhere, like the persistent thought of a scab that was itching to be scratched. But he didn’t know what it was.

‘It’s amazing, isn’t it?’ Laurel sounded breathless, probably with awe and sheer delight. ‘I’ve thought about the possibilities if alternate worlds were to exist, and it positively takes my breath away.’

‘I can see it does.’ Art scratched his nose, puzzled. ‘But isn’t it odd, that this energy is only noticed now? Didn’t theorists in the past notice anything?’

‘They did, but science wasn’t very developed then, you see,’ Laurel replied. ‘Theorists then weren’t called theorists – I think they mostly went by alchemists or philosophers. Some were even called madmen.’ She giggled at the thought. Art rolled his eyes and grinned.

It began to rain then, big fat drops pelting the roof and bare earth. Laurel leapt up immediately and dashed into the house screaming, ‘I thought the monsoon was over! Mum! Mummeeeee!’

Art stood for a while in the rain, wide-eyed over the facts he had just heard. ‘Alternate worlds. Wow. Can you imagine that?’

Laurel came galloping out of the house with Ellen behind her. ‘Get out of the rain, you idiot!’ Laurel shrieked. Art followed the two of them out into the fields, with empty baskets banging against their backs to save what they could out there.

He couldn’t be from an alternate world. It was...impossible. But saying it was impossible didn’t mean that it was.