Usual disclaimers apply. Bioshock Infinite characters are owned by Irrational games.
There must be some way out of here, said the joker to the thief...
- Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower
Rosalind remembers her parents back in England. How could she forget?
Her mother, always clear in her memory, a visionary and a born suffragette. Adamant that intellectual pursuits are not less important for a woman, but on the contrary, more so. You never know when knowledge will save your life.
Her father, more taciturn, less given to open displays of affection, but always there, a guardian. A man of his time, Rosalind always supposed. She knows she herself is not what most people would consider a 'warm' person. Calculus and levelheadedness is her strength, too. Interestingly, quite the opposite seems to have been the case with Robert. Always the visionary Robert, if a tad naïve.
And so, she supposes, in a sense it can be argued that they do not really share parentage. The respective gender of a child, what it inherits, can change its whole world. The same goes for the colour of its skin. How many changed variables does it take for you to stop being you, and being someone else instead? Who would Daisy Fitzroy have been, the Luteces wonder in unison, had her skin been peach rather than chocolate? Had she been man rather than woman?
Robert, sometimes, can agonize about these sorts of questions for hours on end. Rosalind herself is not given to this kind of sophistry, though she does feel gratitude. She knows she lucked out. There was a great deal of support for her intellectual pursuits in the Lutece home, tinged with a sorrow which she could feel viscerally, but never got any explanation for. They encouraged her to think about her own life. They never harried her about getting married or raising a family.
And, happily, she took off for high adventure, her diamond mind leading her down the roads and lanes and alleys of quantum physics, content that she was pursuing her calling to the fullest degree.
Not even when she told them she would be moving to America, accepting the lavish grant she had been offered, to pursue her study of the time-space continuum, did they protest, though she could see the muscles in her father's jaw work and her mother hugged her desperately before putting her on the steamliner. It all had a sense of foreboding to it which she did not, at the time, understand.
She knows more now of course. She would never return to England, not in the flesh.
Instead, she creates a city for her benefactor. She raises Columbia to the heavens, and there she listens and discerns and finds the cracks in the sky itself, through which Roberts familiar-yet-strange eyes peek back at her, like through a crack in an almost closed door. And for a while it is like that game of knocking on walls which she has heard that inmates of American prisons use to stave off madness when they are in solitary confinement. Knock knock, are you there? Yes. You are not alone.
And then the days come when Robert comes through to her, carrying the child, albeit incompletely of course, because the poor wretch of a father, in the end, hangs on to her for dear life. Selfishly, Rosalind reckons, for the child will be offered so much more here than a desperate debt-ridden ex-Pinkerton could ever give (she will later, reluctantly, modify that judgment, but she still can't really regret it all. How could she, knowing what she knows?).
With Robert, of course, it is another matter. She always wonders why he was, is, will be willing to do it, but for many years, he won't talk about it. He clams shut like an oyster and won't say, but whatever Robert saw (sees, will se) when he dealt with the drunkard, the girls' real father, it has changed him. Vision, she realizes, is sometimes a cross to bear, and she does not pursue it. Far be it from her to pry when there is research to be done. Sometimes, sense and sensibility are best off leaving each other alone.
It is not until they watch the girl in the tower growing into a young woman, that she, too, understands what they have done (are doing, must do). It is imperative that this girl become free. Free of Comstock, free of Columbia.
And so, while turmoil is brewing in the bowels of Columbia, Comstock has them murdered (rather spectacularly, Rosalind must admit) in an explosion of time and space, thereby unintentionally aiding rather than upsetting their plans.
And it is when she beholds Booker DeWitt for the first time, that Rosalind understands the silence of her brother.
And so it begins. Through the city and the tears the dance goes, while Rosalind must witness the splendid castles of ideas she built in various stages of decomposition. It isn't easy, dismantling your own preconceptions on the account of them being built on thin air, but she is nothing if not a scientist, and she will see it through, goddammit, if hell should bar the way. Sometimes she is gruffly pushing away Robert's offers of comfort for fear of bursting into tears, at other times just giving up, leaning into him and allowing herself a few short, awkward, tearless sobs.
Here, spread through the entirety of all known realities, he is the only other constant, the only other person she can really lean on. How ironic, she sometimes muses, that it is really herself she is leaning on, but then it comes back to her: how many variables does it take before you are not you anymore? He is Robert, not Rosalind, and that is enough. It will have to be enough.
The whole song-and-dance, Robert says, reminds him rather about the Vedic teachings of the Orient. The dance of Shakti, he elaborates, and she shakes her head and scoffs, because really, spiritualist poppycock is better left to the buffoons of the Golden Dawn, but of course in a sense he is right, and he is only here, and she is only here, because reality is a far more vast thing than anyone could ever grasp. Even they.
And so she gives in and accepts his hand, dancing on a skyrail maintenance platform in the middle of the heavens while the tired man and the young woman are racing past them, and it all plays out in so many ways that were it not for her habit of taking meticulous notes, she would have soon lost track of it. There are, after all, many people making many choices in this city, day after day (Upon closer examination of the background of Daisy Fitzroy, Robert finds her broken down in hysterical, Homeric fits of laughter, from which she can barely recover long enough to let him in on the secret that Comstock already has a daughter, the result of the Prophet's post-baptismal rape of another housemaid called Anna, before Columbia even took to the clouds. Not that he would know or care, of course).
And Daisy wages war against the Prophet of Columbia, or Comstock kills her before she can do it, or she leaves Columbia for good, or she gets arrested, or she kills him, or she emerges victorious only to find the house of the Prophet already long since abandoned. And through it all, the tired man and the young woman are running, always running, set us free, set us free.
Or he, she, they, die aiding Daisy's revolution, or – in one particularly memorable (though hardly comfortable) instance - the Bird becomes the Lamb and, seventy years later, like a terrible mother, demands that the False Shepherd keep his oath to her, which he does, smothering the life out of her to save her, all the while roaring in agony as his heart breaks and New York burns below.
And Rosalind feels queasy in the new knowledge that, indeed, the sins of the parents are always visited upon the children, oftentimes whether they want to or no. Violence, it seems, runs deep like blood through the very veins of Columbia, and Rosalind ponders what she has done while she and Robert, like a pair of parents themselves, nudge, admonish, advise, cajole these two cosmic children, looking for a moment that Rosalind increasingly thinks will never happen, and she can't decide whether she is relieved or not. But Robert isn't, that much is clear, because New York is still going to burn, and it's Our Fault.
The 122nd trip on the merry-go-round is different. That's how she and Robert know they are approaching the solution they are looking for. They know it when they see Elizabeth dance in the sun before him. Like Shakti before Shiva, Robert reiterates, and Rosalind can only nod, mutely, because he was always the visionary and she is starting to grasp what that means.
And later, when the ancient Lamb is moved to mercy and lets her shepherd go, and the young girl is free of the siphon, and the baptism has been refused the first time and Booker DeWitt stands in the waters of his own impending sacrifice, the Lutece twins can only watch as his Elizabeth grabs his hand and disappears through a crack in the sky itself. Rosalind notes dryly that the lacing of the young lady's corset was broken. The sanatorium? she wonders, and sends Robert back to look, and he comes back not saying a word, but clearing his throat and correcting the collar of his shirt in a distinctly embarrassed manner.
In many ways, he later muses, it seems ironic that in the looming shadow of the 123rd dance, the one they feel rather confident will render void both Comstock and Columbia and possibly (though not with 100% percent certainty) themselves, for the better of the world, they got to witness what may have been their own creation, and Rosalind agrees (hiding a treacherous little tear behind a laced handkerchief) that it is all rather mythological indeed.
For what are we all if not each others daughters and sons and fathers and mothers and siblings and lovers?
But then, it is really rather obvious when one thinks of it. After all, 'Lutece' is the French form of Lutetia, the ancient name of Paris. And if this is the price of Paris, maybe it is worth paying.
I always thought part of the brilliance of Booker and Elizabeth's relationship is that it defies categorization, much like that of Rosalind and Robert. Both are damn near cosmic representations of the act of Relating itself, and its importance for us as beings.
But supposing a universe of endless possibilities…different choices are clearly made. This one among them doesn't seem far fetched.