Charlotte worries sometimes about Ivy. Ivy might get in the way. She worries about Jasper too, and Ravi, and Ravi’s mother, and Mr. Vanders. These are Charlotte’s least favorite people. She’s less worried about Jasper now, though, because he’s giving himself a massive brain injury trying to break out of the closet.
Charlotte worries, but not too much. She knows she’s doing well so far. She’s only just begun.
A bell rings somewhere in the depths of the house,
sweet and clear, like a wind chime.
Mrs. Vanders, the little girl, Kiran, Ravi, or Jasper?
Aunt Magnolia? Jane thinks. Where should I go?
Jane, Unlimited
Jane decides.
“Oh, hell,” she says.
“What is it?” says Kiran.
The thing that worries Jane most about choosing Ravi is that it feels . . . a little too tempting. And distracting, from other things in the house that are certainly more important. But, “There’s something I need to check on,” she tells Kiran. “I’ll join up with you later, okay?”
Kiran shrugs, disappointed. “Okay. I’ll be in the winter garden.” She wanders off.
As Jane steps onto the landing, Jasper blocks her path, clambering around her feet as if he thinks they’re a portal to his home planet.
“Fuzzball!” she says. “Desist!”
She rushes past him up the stairs but he’s utterly determined to follow her. It’s too pathetic. She slows down to let him catch up. “Jasper,” she says. “You’re breaking my heart.”
When she gets to the third-floor east wing, Ravi is standing right there, a little way down the corridor, his back to her. He’s bent over his phone, balancing his fruit and toast in one hand. Jane stops and waits, unseen.
Ravi pockets his phone, redistributes his food, and starts moving. Then, inexplicably, Jasper sneaks past Ravi, runs farther down the corridor, and begins frolicking and larking about in a manner that seems designed to distract Ravi, dancing and hopping in a way Jane wouldn’t have thought possible.
“Dog of little brain,” Ravi tells him fondly.
The runner muffles Jane’s footsteps as she follows them. When Ravi reaches the door with the doormat that says WELCOME TO MY WORLDS, he unlocks the door with a key from his pocket.
Jane hotfoots it forward, sticks her foot in the door before it closes, and applies her eye to the crack. Jasper joins her. She catches a glimpse of Ravi’s torso, legs, feet before he disappears up a squeaky spiral staircase.
A woman with a deep voice says something cheerful-sounding in a language Jane doesn’t understand. Ravi responds in kind. The woman says something else, at length.
“Thanks,” Ravi responds in English. “Here, I brought you some fruit, courtesy of Patrick.”
“Oh, thank you, darling,” the woman says, with a British accent that perhaps contains a hint of the Indian subcontinent. “I’d expected to eat in UD17, but my counterpart there is in no state for hospitality.”
“You sound worried,” says Ravi. “Did something go wrong?”
“The UD17 house is in danger of being boarded by pirates.”
“Pirates!” says Ravi. “What kind of pirates? Are they after the art?”
“Oh, Ravi, you always think everything’s about the art. No. They’re UD17 pirates, looking for the portal in the tower. Everyone’s very stressed out about it.”
“Oh,” Ravi says. “How do they know about the portal?”
“Unclear. The existence of the multiverse is common knowledge in UD17, but we’ve kept this particular portal hidden. They have it in their pea-sized brains that they’ll be able to use it to travel to alternate dimensions, locate alternate versions of themselves, then bring them back through, into UD17, to bulk up their numbers.”
At the foot of the steps, Jane is incredulous. “What on earth is UD17?” she whispers to Jasper. “And how can a house be boarded by pirates?” And how can pirates have alternate-dimension versions of themselves? And, seriously, just, what the hell?
“Why is that a pea-sized idea?” asks Ravi. “Wouldn’t that work?”
“Of course it would work!” the voice exclaims. “That’s why I’m so worried! Here, have your stupid UD17 Monet and stop pestering me with questions!”
“Oh, come on, Mum,” says Ravi. “Don’t take it out on me. It’s your own fault; you opened those portals. You and all the alternate versions of you.”
“I’ve never told anyone outside the family about the portals. You can’t blame me if alternate-dimension versions of me are indiscreet within their own dimensions. I am not they!”
“And yet I have an idea of what most of them are like,” says Ravi wearily.
“Be respectful,” says the first Mrs. Thrash. “We’re your mother.” There is a pause. “Well?” she says, rather aggressively. “How are you?”
“I’m fine, Mum,” says Ravi, an edge to his voice. “Worried about Kiran. She still seems low.”
“Still blaming me for that, are you?”
“Ma,” says Ravi sharply, while Jane wonders if maybe Kiran’s depressed because her mother is delusional.
“What Kiran needs is a job,” says the first Mrs. Thrash. “Such a brilliant child, and she’s wasting it, mooning about with no direction. I’ve noticed quite a motivational range across the spectrum of Kirans I’ve met, have I told you? I never know what Kiran to expect. Some of them are dynamos. The Kiran in Unlimited Dimension 17 is now—”
“Oh my god!” Ravi says. “I don’t want to know! Haven’t we done enough damage with that already?”
“Oh, don’t be silly. How’s Ivy? You could bring Ivy to visit me, you know. I could hide my little pets upstairs.”
“Ivy knows all about your pets. Kiran told Patrick everything; you know that. Patrick told the Vanders family and Ivy.”
“And you criticize me for being indiscreet.”
“It won’t go any further if Vanny has anything to say about it,” says Ravi. “Anyway, she’s decided it’s a fairy tale. You know how Vanny is.”
“She doesn’t understand it, therefore she thinks it’s magic, eh?”
“Precisely.”
“What do you tell Vanny when you bring her the paintings from UD17?”
“She makes a point of not asking,” Ravi says.
“Just like you make a point of not asking Vanny why she knows so many out-of-the-way collectors who want to buy your weird art for their personal collections.”
“It’s her field. Of course she has contacts.”
“I think there’s something fishy going on there. She’s mixed up in the art black market or something.”
“Oh, Mum,” says Ravi, sighing. “Mrs. Vanders is the world’s most respectable person. She helps me out of kindness. First she convinces herself that the pictures are normal, then she passes them on to collectors she met in grad school. It’s that simple. Are you going to show me what you brought me?”
There’s another pause. Then the first Mrs. Thrash says, “Well? Is it the sort of picture you hoped for?”
“Better than,” says Ravi. “You’ve done well. Buckley’s going to love the animatronic frogs on the lily pads.”
“There’s a Limited Dimension I’ve visited,” says Mrs. Thrash. “LD387. Their Monet didn’t paint frogs on his lily pads at all. In fact, I don’t think a single art movement in that world has ever focused on frogs, with the possible exception of their Muppets. Which makes me wonder, where did the Kermit of their world come from?”
“Is he any different?”
“Well, he’s not blue. He’s pea green.”
“Pea green!”
“And he’s in love with Miss Piggy.”
“Oh, just stop it,” Ravi says.
“Would you like a frogless lily pad Monet in your inventory? I’ll see what I can do next time I’m there. It’s trickier in a Limited Dimension because—well—we’re dealing with smaller-minded versions of ourselves, of course. Less imaginative. They may not want to sell.”
“I thought our own dimension was a Limited Dimension.”
“Well, yes, we’ve categorized it as one, for the moment. But the categorization is an ongoing process, and the more we learn about what’s commonplace across dimensions and what isn’t, the more our categorizations change. I won’t be at all surprised if our dimension is recategorized as Unlimited someday. There could be transnormal phenomena here we haven’t discovered yet.”