Before they left, Elsa gently lifted the wounded Pascaline into her arms, intent on taking it with her. She’d lost so much—she wasn’t going to give up on this, too, without at least trying to repair it.
They took the doorbook back to Amsterdam, surprising a pair of old ladies with parasols half to death when they appeared out of nowhere on the sidewalk. They cast furtive glances at de Vries and Elsa before nervously scurrying away down the sidewalk.
Up in the flat, Elsa washed up and changed again into her mother’s laborious European clothing—chemise, stiff-boned corset, long skirts, high-necked white blouse, fitted jacket. The clothes were uncomfortable and impractical, and it struck her that she’d never asked Jumi how she’d felt when she traveled in Europe. Elsa had thought she’d known everything about her mother, and this small detail suddenly seemed of desperate importance. Panic roiled in her stomach. What else didn’t she know?
Elsa pulled herself together, finished with the jacket buttons, and gathered whatever else of Jumi’s possessions she could find that might be of use. De Vries gave her a pair of carpetbags: a larger one for the stack of rescued books and a smaller one for the Pascaline and her mother’s personal items. She looked at him curiously when he came out of his room with his own set of packed luggage—she’d assumed he would return immediately to Amsterdam after making the introductions—but he offered no explanation.
“Well, I think that’s everything,” said Elsa. “Have you been to Pisa before?”
“It has been some time,” de Vries said, stretching out the words with a reluctance that made Elsa wonder if there was more to the story. He didn’t seem to be in a forthcoming mood, though, so Elsa decided not to press him.
“Any time is good enough, so long as you’ve been there. Just describe a particular place to me. Something unique.” She opened the doorbook to a fresh page. “Do they have any distinctive buildings in Pisa?”
He smiled. “Yes, you could say that.”
De Vries gave her details and Elsa scribed them onto the page in the proper order, but her mind kept straying elsewhere, back to the events of the past day. Had the intruders taken Jumi because of her madness? It would’ve been easier to abduct someone here on Earth if they just needed a scriptologist. So they probably wanted Jumi specifically, but to what end? How could Elsa get Jumi back if she didn’t even know who had taken her or why?
So many questions, and no answers in sight.
3
YOU MAY HAVE THE UNIVERSE IF I MAY HAVE ITALY.
—Giuseppe Verdi
They stepped out of the portal’s darkness into a bright, pale world. Elsa looked around: they were standing on a flat, featureless plain, everything around them obscured by white haze.
De Vries squinted, wiped the condensation off his glasses with a handkerchief, and looked around again. “This … I don’t believe this is right.”
“No,” Elsa agreed primly. “We quite failed to get there.”
He paled. “You mean to say failure was an option?”
“Oh, no need to worry. I scribed the doorbook to shunt you to a fabricated world if the description isn’t accurate enough to connect to the destination. Minimal possibility of accidents with bad portals. It’s proved thoroughly reliable so far.”
“The fact that the doorbook hasn’t brought you to an untimely demise yet is hardly a consolation. I’ve told you before, the very idea of connecting two locations on Earth to each other makes me nervous. It’s unnatural.”
“You have a talent for worrying. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“Yes,” he said. “Your mother. Frequently.”
Elsa set down her carpetbags and sat cross-legged beside them. The ground was smooth and flawless like polished stone, but not as hard. Actually, it felt almost supple. She pressed her fingertips into it, and five imprints remained when she pulled her hand away. They slowly disappeared as the material rebounded. “Fascinating, isn’t it? How a world will spontaneously generate properties that weren’t specified in the text.”
“I’m afraid the study of emergent properties has been somewhat out of fashion in recent years,” de Vries said.
“Right. Of course. Because of Jumi.” People were a difficult thing to create—when they were directly scribed into the worldtext, they turned out like puppets, capable of basic call-and-response communication but with no consciousness, no sense of self. The Veldanese were the first successful attempt at scribed people, created as subtext using emergent property theory. Veldana was scribed with cottages and agriculture and drinking water, but the people themselves were not specified in the text; they were merely implied by the existence of human infrastructure.
The Veldanese were considered a major breakthrough in the science of scriptology. But when Jumi had fought back, demanding autonomy for her people, the scientific community had banned the creation of more populated worlds like Veldana.
Elsa sorted through her belt pouches and brought out a fountain pen, a bottle of ink, and the doorbook.
“You’re not going to do that here, while we’re still inside, are you?” de Vries said, aghast. “What next—shall we modify an airship engine while we’re in the air?”
“Relax. I’d have to do something monumentally careless to strand us here forever. How did you ever get to be one of Europe’s preeminent scriptologists with such a cautious attitude?”
Grumpily, he replied, “By living longer than all of the really brilliant ones.”
Bending over the doorbook intently, Elsa copied what she’d written onto a fresh page. She’d been distracted and gotten sloppy, so now she adjusted the syntax and asked de Vries for additional details to flesh out the description. After a few minutes of work, she said, “There. I think that should work now. Shall we give it a try?”
“How sure are you that it’s not going to kill us?”
“Um … ninety-seven percent sure?” Elsa grinned. She handed the book up to him so he could hold it open while the ink dried, then put away her writing supplies and stood.
De Vries harrumphed. “Well, at least you’re smiling about something. Not the thing I would have picked, though.”
Elsa sobered. For a moment there, she’d been too swept up in their adventure to remember her mother was missing. Guilt blossomed in her chest, and she swore to herself: no more smiling until she got Jumi back.
She dialed the new coordinates into her portal device, activated a portal, and tucked the device away again. Then she picked up her luggage and stepped through without turning to see if de Vries would follow.
He did, of course, emerging from the darkness a few seconds behind her. They stood in a broad, grassy square near the right transept of an elaborate cathedral. The facade was an excess of columns and arches carved out of pale stone. To the left, near the front entrance of the cathedral, was a squat, round baptistery built in the same style. On their right, a multitiered bell tower tilted precariously away from the cathedral.
“That,” Elsa observed, “is some poor architecture.”