Any Way the Wind Blows

by Seanan McGuire

everything about it is familiar, and nothing about it is familiar, and I am so very far away from home.

There are only so many wonders you can see before you start thinking longingly of your own bed in your own room in your own home, of the pillows battered into the shape of your head, the mattress that knows every curve of your body better than a lover ever could, the heater that rattles in that way that turned into white noise years ago, unremarkable, soothing, memorable only in its absence.

We once found a parallel where the pigeons had somehow turned carnivorous and bloodthirsty. A flock could pick the flesh off a human’s bones in under a minute, the piranhas of the sky.

These are facts about the universe in which we live: First, it’s basically a sheet of baklava that hasn’t been cut.

Worlds that aren’t watched have a tendency to blink into nothingness and be forgotten, filling the belly of some cosmic terror, creating yet another hole in the pastry. When a world gets eaten and a hole opens up, it’s easier for the baklava-eaters to shove their nasty little hands in and pry more pieces loose.

If one world opens a window on another, they view themselves as peaceful explorers. If a world has a window opened on it, they view the people on the other side as hostile invaders. Aren’t humans fun?

We map the baklava, because we can’t tell when things are missing unless we know what’s supposed to be there.

We travel by airship like civilized people, sailing across the endless sea of parallel worlds, making our lists and checking them twice, telling our archives who’s naughty or nice.

“Lightning.” I close my eyes for a moment. The swear isn’t big enough. I need real profanity for this. “Lightning and equipment failure.

We try to minimize interaction with the people native to the various parallels, for reasons ranging from “everyone has a different local flu” to “we find them vaguely unsettling.”