The farmhand used the name Hayden, which was really just my mother’s maiden name. They never gave their real names—I guess because we’d have a hard time pronouncing them. His accent was subtle enough to prove our language didn’t give him too much trouble, although I wondered if his vorpal helped him understand what people meant even when he didn’t understand their words.
He stayed in the spare room, where a shelf held paper copies of the Girl Queen stories that my little sisters had gotten before the movie adaptation came out. Afternoons, I’d sit on the sacred bed where Hayden slept and I’d pull down volumes to read. I pretended if I read them enough times I could find a way there. Hayden would go too. In the Other Place, there would be no worry about interfering. No government fines, no stares or whispers. He could interfere with me all he wanted.
Once at dinner I watched in awe as he shoveled down creamed corn. Was it only an illusion or could aliens really eat solid food?
The newsfeed blared from the wall monitor, coverage on the latest climate conference. Dad was ready for the usual argument over carbon taxes.
“We make good money from corn, shipping it around the world,” he said. “But who’s going to buy it with a carbon tax attached?”
I waited for Grandpop’s usual response. My little sisters were pressed into the back of their chairs like they wished they could escape through the wooden slats. Mom passed around the bowl of blackberries like a peace offering.
“There’s enough demand for corn right here in the U.S.,” Grandpop said, so that he and Dad sounded just like the politicians who always popped on the nightly newsfeeds. “We can’t keep shipping it. How much farmland will be left in this country in twenty years when it’s too hot to grow anything? Taxing carbon’s the only way to restrict people from using corn to ruin our country.”
“No point in arguing with you on this one.” Dad pointed his fork at the newsfeed playing on the screen. “They’ll never agree on anything—carbon taxes included.”
But to everyone’s surprise, the newsfeed wasn’t going to address carbon taxes at all. The feed cut to an image of the delegates at the climate conference. “The World Meteorological Organization has confirmed that allowing the Other Place to funnel energy from our sun’s solar activity would stabilize global temperatures . . .”
“What does it mean?” I asked Grandpop while everyone else sat in stunned silence.
“It means the people from the Other Place are going to help us cool down this planet after all,” Grandpop said, and turned to Hayden as if waiting for him to confirm it.
On-screen, the report continued. “Scientists say a small amount of energy has been passing from our universe to the Other Place for decades, but world leaders will now work to find a way to increase that flow.”
I listened in awe. My little sisters tried to explain it to each other: “They’re going to fix everything!”
But I noticed concern creeping into Grandpop’s eyes.
“It’ll take years to reverse the damage that’s already been done to the planet,” he said. “Decades, maybe.”
“But it means no carbon taxes,” I said. “That’s better for the country, right? For everyone.”
Grandpop looked to Hayden, who met Grandpop’s gaze with steely stoicism. “They seem to have the delegates at the conference convinced, anyway,” Grandpop said. I knew, then, what was really going on: The aliens had finally used their vorpals to make us all agree on how to fix our problems.
During the next week, we kept the newsfeed on at all hours. The Energy Transfer Deal, as they were calling it, made everyone happy—world leaders, senators in slick suits, hosts of talk shows. There was only the matter of finding a way to open the floodgates and let the Other Place swallow the heat we’d been baking in for too long.
And then the answer came: We’d have to cross over into the Other Place. The more of us who did, the more channels would open to let solar energy slide through.
But that seemed impossible. You had to have a strong vorpal to cross over, and that was all a matter of genetics.
“How will we manage it?” I asked Grandpop one day while we watched the newsfeeds together. “How will people cross over into the Other Place?”
“I don’t know if we will.” He kept his eyes glued on the screen, but his gaze was unfocused. “Or if we should.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “You think it might be bad for us to go there?”
“Everything has its price.”
And he was lost again in thought.
“What will it be like for us, if we cross into the Other Place?” I asked Hayden later, when I found him alone in the kitchen marveling over a loaf of walnut cranberry bread. “Will it be like it was for Dylan? Forests and rivers and palaces?”
He shoved the loaf of bread back onto the cutting board like he’d been caught stealing. “You will find what he found.”
I leaned on the counter and tried to read what was in his gaze. He was always so cryptic. He almost never said anything about the place he’d come from. He just referred us to Dylan’s stories, as though a child’s understanding was all we needed. Maybe he thought he couldn’t explain it any better.