The Fourth World (pt 2)

Jeffery was certainly not ready to accept everything at once, but Sydonie did not seem to leave him any choice, really. She turned and went out the door, with the baby in her arms, and Jeffery felt he ought to follow.

Finally, when she was feeding the baby in the kitchen, he asked, "Why did you send me to the world with the mermaids?"

"To see how you would react. We were pretty sure you'd make a good worldwalker, but we had to make sure."

"I ran away!"

"Oh, but cowardice is no big deal. In fact, it's desired--it means you're human. If you had thrown rocks at the mermaids, or tried to seduce them, or despaired entirely and flung yourself in with them...then we would have worried. And that world was a good place to send you because it was so stable that no matter what happened you wouldn't screw it up. Mating mermaids cannot be deterred."

"They were mating?"

"You do remember their singing, don't you? Those were mating songs, mating calls. And didn't you notice the egg mounds in the morning?"

"I wasn't looking for egg mounds at the time, somehow!" he said. Sydonie was simply quiet, though, rocking the baby.

"What will you do with her?"

"I won't," she said simply. "You will."

"What were you planning for me to do with her, then?" he demanded. He certainly did not appreciate her assumption that she was completely in control of his life.

"Take her to another world, of course," Sydonie said, as though it were obvious.

"No! I'm not going back to any other world. Not when I finally managed to get back!"

Sydonie looked up at him, though only for a moment. "This isn't your world," she said simply.

"No?" His heart fell again, and then his fury rose up.

"I know," said Sydonie. "It's a little similar-looking, from in here. But this 'world' is only a little fragment of something that was made for me to live on. If I walk straight down that road half a mile, through a bunch a mist, It'll come back to my house again. This isn't a real world at all."

Jeffery had no idea what to say. It was almost as if, when it was most important to have something to say for himself, he was out of practice. He supposed it had only been a day since he was in his own world, but something told him it had been a great deal longer as well.

The baby was asleep now. Sydonie set her down in a the crib at the far end of the kitchen. Then she turned and came to him, and there was suddenly no longer anything in her that made her seem young, or impulsive, and nothing about the way she moved was careless.

"Listen, Jeffery," she said, and a small part of him shivered that she knew his name. "You've lived practically all your life so far in what is truly one of the dreariest worlds in existence. Even drearier than the world I come from. People in your world abandoned all religion almost 2,000 years ago--that's pretty much is all you have to know to understand your world. Are you really content to spend all your life in there, in your same boring technical job, living alone in an apartment building that looks the same as the other half a thousand in the city?"

And Jeffery realized quite suddenly that he wasn't. The mermaids had frightened him, but they had amazed him too, and enchanted him, and inflamed his curiosity. They were the most brilliant, beautiful things he had seen in his entire life. And though he had spent barely three minutes in the other world, he guessed it held an infinite number of wonders of its own, the least of which was the child sleeping peacefully in her cradle across the room from him. His knee-jerk reaction had been to get home, but now he knew with just as much certainty that he did not want to stay there.

After a long moment he took a sudden, sharp, breath, and said "Explain to me what I have to do."