Mirrorworld (5 page)

The Master, as Marcus supposed this must be, was actually more of a Mistress. Though the key features of the face he was looking at were somewhat obscured by great fatigue and the innocently lost expression of a person who had just woken up, it was still an observably female one. It was also possibly quite attractive, but beyond the large bags obscuring the eyes, the huge tumble of hair and the continuing pink-themed dress sense, Marcus found it hard to judge.

“Are you Marcus?” the apparition asked, yawning. “Marcus Chiallion?”

Marcus decided it was best just to nod. This prompted a raised eyebrow.

“Can you speak? Seriously. I mean it. I ask people to write memos for this sort of thing so I know in advance and don’t make an idiot of myself. They never do it. You see, aside from, y’know, diseases and defects and stuff, the trick we used to bring you in was massively risky and you could quite possibly have been robbed of your faculties, or worse-“

“Yes,” Marcus said, clearly and loudly, in an attempt to dam the sudden torrent of words, “I can speak. And my name is Marcus, which you know. Which means..” he paused, staring at the Master, who stared right back. “I don’t know what that means. I don’t think I want to know. To be honest, I’ve got no idea what’s happening anymore. They told me you’d be able to help. Do I want your help?”

The Master shook her head slightly, dislodging a bobble which had been feebly attempting to hold some of her hair in place. As she tugged it out her dark locks cascaded around her face in what Marcus considered an incredibly off-putting manner. The motion ended with her head tilted to one side, observing Marcus curiously from her side of the desk. “Don’t you feel any different?” she asked.

“What?”

“You know, like, internally, or something? In your mind?”

Marcus weighed up his possible responses to this rather unspecific and unhelpful question, and decided that he couldn’t do better than be honest. “I’m not entirely sure what’s happening in my mind right now,” he said. “There are memories doing all sorts of strange somersaults up here. You see, I was drinking a lot lately, and actually was kind of hoping to drown my state of mind, so maybe I succeeded. Also, I was very recently exploded, which might have been a contributing factor there.”

He could have sworn he saw a wicked grin flash across the Master’s face before her gaze settled on abject solemnity. “Yes, sorry about the whole exploding thing, that was partly our fault. Well, completely our fault. You see, we needed to get you here as quickly as possible, because you may be able to help us with something important. You, yourself, are so incredibly important that we had to resort to using an almost entirely untested new method of instantaneous transportation, just to bring you in!”

“And what was that?” Marcus asked, eyeing the door.

“We ripped you out of the fabric of space and time, and spliced you back in somewhere else.”

Marcus stared straight into the Master’s eyes, but as far as he could tell, she had indeed just said what he thought she’d just said.

“The fabric of space..?”

“And time, yes,” she said, nodding her head imperiously. “Ripped.” And then she grinned, definitely this time, and began scouting around the mess of her desk for something, whilst Marcus sat there digesting this new information.

“Wh-“ he began, but was interrupted as the Master gave a cry of joy and grabbed hold of a nearby plastic cup. She held it up to her cheek, and sighed happily.

“What’s that?” Marcus asked, “some sort of space-and-time-rending material?”

“That’s exactly what it is,” the Master agreed. “But on this world, we call it coffee. And it’s still warm! I must have only been asleep a few minutes after all. Huzzah.” She took a deep gulp from the cup whilst Marcus sat wondering what he should say or do next.

After a moment, the Master stood up and began to stretch. “I expect you’re wondering, Marcus, exactly what you should be saying or doing right now. Unfortunately, before we get to that there’s a lot still to explain, and I have certificates demonstrating how awful I am at explaining things. Luckily, we’ve got some clever stuff that can do it for me, saving on embarrassment all round. What I will tell you is.. what my people and I did was not as simple as picking you out of one place and dropping you somewhere else. Obviously you’ve probably figured out that this isn’t the same geographical location you were in last night, or this morning, or whenever it was. But that’s not all. This isn’t just a different place, Marcus. This is a different
world
.”

While talking, the Master had walked over to the window, swaying slightly, and as she finished, she attempted a sort of dramatic flourish at the city lurking outside. Thanks to the ridiculously baggy sleeves of her blouse, however, she succeeded only in getting herself into a worse tangle, and had to spend a few moments sorting out hair from cloth.

“Now, come with me,” she said, reattaching her bobble, which made little difference, “and we’ll show you the Mirrorworld.”

The planet Earth.

Billions of years old, a seemingly insignificant lump of rock in the abyss of space, rolling around a small star in endless pursuit of its own tail. And yet not so, for it is at the same time a teeming mass of life, of thought, of breath, care and reason. This small planet defies the great space of the universe by playing host to a cacophony of colour, light, the sheer bloody-minded nature of existence, and people, so many people, many of whom are self-aware enough to look to the night sky, bask in the glow of infinite possibility, and ask, is this all there is? Surely, somewhere out there, near or far, there must be
more
?

The answer to this question, however, is a rather difficult one.

“Where are we?” Marcus asked.

He stood on an endless plain, with infinity stretching off in every direction. Overhead there was sky, more sky than he could ever recall seeing ever before, and it was full of clouds. Pastel-painted in uncountable colours, they rolled, thundered and crashed around in a way that wrenched the eye.

“We are,” the Master, standing next to him in the abyss, replied, “somewhere very exciting.”

“I find that hard to believe,” Marcus said, peering about. “I’m more concerned with how we walked through a door a few seconds ago, and entered an impossibly large room. The door’s gone, you know. That worries me a little bit.”

“Don’t panic,” the Master said, “it’s almost perfectly safe. We’re in a theoretical room, bound by dimensional energy. Look, watch this, I’ll make more sense afterwards.” With a whirl of her sleeves, she conjured from somewhere something that looked quite a bit like a remote control, pointed it at the sky, and pressed play.

Instantly, the pattern of the swirling of the clouds changed, rolling together into two distinct shapes that then swept themselves aside, revealing clear skies beyond. Adorning this blank canvas was the image of a very familiar looking planet.

“For hundreds of years,”
came a sudden voice that sprung from nowhere, deep and bass, and left Marcus’s ears feeling like they’d had warm treacle poured into them,
“Planet Earth has been wondering if it is alone in the night sky of the universe. As we know, it is not. In their gentle pursuit of the stars for answers, however, the people of Earth fail to realise exactly how close their closest neighbours are. Because, across space and time, connected by that most fragile of links, Earth has a twin.

At this point, two large mirrors materialised on either side of the floating planet. Hugely ornate affairs, they were formed by a sudden twist of cloud which suggested that they had in fact been there all along, just waiting for their cue. With the planet caught between them, it could be seen reflecting off into infinity through the mirrors as they began to rotate around it. Marcus’s mind began to boggle.

“Mirrors share a strange quality that is rarely remarked on; they lie. The truth that a mirror shows is never the truth as experienced by the observer. Wink your left eye to your reflection, and it winks its right eye back. In mirrors, we see what we expect to see, a reflection of ourselves and the world around us. But such is the truth; the world the mirror shows is not our own, and this lie that mirrors tell is no less real than that which it reflects.. not from the inside. Here, in that oft-forgotten space on the far side of your reflection, the individual moments of Earth are infinitely captured and recreated. Thus is another world born, one that recreates and yet distorts its benefactor. Thus exists the Mirrorworld.”

As the sky mirrors sketched a path around the planet, it began to change. Colours flowed out of their homely spots, beginning new journeys to unforeseen lands, where they came together anew. In that unearthly sky the Earth recreated itself, continental patterns shifting away and reforming into shapes that managed to be completely new yet vaguely familiar at the same time.
Here
lay a desert over what was once a rainforest.
There
, the ocean reclaimed long-lost land. Sea levels fell and ancient civilisations arose once more. Cities vanished into cracked maws as countless millennia of continental drift made up for lost time. Ancient jigsaws clicked back together, decided that that had been a mistake, and connected back up a different way instead. After a few moments, Marcus found himself staring amazedly at a planet that definitely wasn’t, but might once have been, Earth. At his side, the Master was humming faintly.

“Balance,”
the treacle voice continued ominously,
“is key. These worlds that we share differ many times over for every one thing that stays the same.”
Above
,
the new planet moved over to the side slightly, to allow another vision of an unaltered Earth to fade gently back into existence next to it.
From the sides, clouds began to leak back into the image, filling the space between the two planets with their whirling intensity as the voice picked up again.
“Here, in the gulf between our two worlds, lies the space that is not space, the chaotic dimension that we call the Mirrorline. Understanding the Mirrorline is the key to understanding how to maintain this balance, to understanding how to keep our worlds distinct and happy. Such is the life’s work of the Viaggiatori, the elite organisation of those who walk between the worlds. As one who has crossed the Mirrorline, you too must now shoulder this responsibility, and the power that comes with it, for all our sakes.”

Suddenly, Marcus flinched, as an incredible pressure had descended upon him. It was as if there had been thousands of eyes watching him ever since he had stepped into this strange space, and he had only just realised they were there. As creeping feelings go, it was off the charts.

“Sorry about this,” he heard the Master say nearby, “it does get a bit preachy at this part. I’ll stop it. No, wait, wrong button,” she added, as the scene overhead suddenly began to undo itself with the same level of mind-melting care that it had created itself with, “that was rewind.”

Marcus felt himself begin to sweat as reality peacefully continued to cease existing overhead. That sense of pressure was still there, slowly squeezing out all other senses until the Master’s grumbling was barely audible and his sanity was starting to go down the same exciting road that his vision was on. Just as he felt that he might implode, the sky blinked out, the pressure lifted, and someone appeared out of nowhere right in front of him.

“You called for me, Master?” the new apparition asked.

“Oh, hello Eustace,” the Master said, tossing the remote control away over her shoulder, where it winked out of existence before hitting the ground. “You took your time. You missed the show!”

“I’ve seen it,” the apparition said. “It’s boring. Who’s this chap?”

“Ah yeah. Eustace, this is Marcus. Marcus, this is Eustace, our chief scholar, or something like that. He is, in fact, real, and not part of the show, so you can say hi now.”

Marcus, who had been waiting for the punch line, else another attack of the treacle voice, relaxed. Or at least, he became as calm as he felt he could manage in an infinite realm where the crazy clouded sky was just starting to fade back into existence and people appeared out of thin air and there wasn’t a visible exit. “Hello,” he managed, focusing on the new arrival. A short, elderly man with a long grey beard that somehow didn’t seem to fit properly, everything about him screamed ‘scholar’, right down to his eyes, which were deep blue twinkling pools of knowledge that knew all the things that you never would, knew that you knew that they knew, and let you off. Casually attired in a dressing gown, slippers and an irritable expression, the old man was possibly the most terrifying thing that Marcus had seen so far that day, and that was saying something.

“Yes. Hello,” Eustace said, and sighed heavily. “Let’s get to business, shall we? I see Eira has been showing you the frankly rubbish orientation video, so clearly you’re new in town and want to know more of what this Mirrorworld business is all about. Since I have been cruelly dragged from my bath, I can only surmise that she has either failed to or pre-emptively given up on answering your questions, which is probably a wise choice but unfortunately leaves me somewhat hung out with no idea where to start. So why don’t you tell me where you’re at? Take a seat, by the way.”

Marcus looked around; the immediate area was now filled with seats of all shapes and sizes. They didn’t appear to be actively dangerous, so he decided to make use of one. “You talk fast,” he said, settling into a wicker rocking chair.

“And you, my boy, point out the obvious. Do you want to play or not?”

“Eustace..” the Master said, moving past to curl up on a nearby sofa. “Be nice.”

“Eira, my dear, you know I have near boundless patience and appreciation for you, and I might have more if you’d give me a little kiss from time to time, but I will not spend my time indulging the kids you pick up on the quasi-dimensional streets if they’re not going to return the ball once in a while.” The Master stuck her tongue out at him and kicked her shoes off.

“Fine, old man,” Marcus grumbled, “here’s your ball back. There’s the world I know, the planet Earth, and then somewhere on the other side of our mirrors is this other world, the Mirrorworld, and they’re connected by something called the Mirrorline that keeps them separate, because they’re not the same, and presumably you’re part of the people who take care of all that. The Veeajatree.”