Regarding Ducks and Universes (17 page)

“Y
ou think the duck pacifier started an event chain?” Arni said to Bean. “How?”

“I have no idea,” Bean admitted frankly, taking a chair at the Be Mine Inn breakfast table. “Maybe Felix got bored while his parents were admiring views of Alcatraz and Angel Island and chucked the pacifier at a passing bicyclist who stumbled and broke his leg—all right, it can’t have been anything that big, we’d have heard about it in other Y-day interviews…er…well, there’s a chance a photo taken by another tourist might have captured the moment.”

“Not with our luck.” Arni tapped Photo 13B with the magnifying glass. “Duck in this one, banana in the other. I don’t know how we missed that. Why are they both yellow anyway? Ducks aren’t yellow. Only their bills or feet, maybe.”

“All bananas aren’t yellow either,” I said distractedly. “There are red and purple bananas too. Are you suggesting that all the grand differences between our two universes stem from these…these artificial
nipples
that my parents gave us to keep us occupied?”

“Yes and no.” Arni scratched his ear. “There was a brief moment when everything in A and B remained exactly the same, except for whatever it is you and Felix B did differently at 11:46:01. Then a commuter missed her train, lightning hit a tree, a dog bit a man, sperm found an egg—some of it in A, some in B, some in both. The current state of Universe A is partly due to the original Y-day event chain, but also to independent event chains that emerged as time went on. Think of two snowballs poised at the top of a hill. Give them a nudge and they both head downhill. Where they end up at the bottom depends not just the direction they were pushed in, but on the stuff they encounter along the way, rocks and trees and snowdrifts and such.”

“So some things are your fault, others aren’t,” Bean summarized.

“Gee, thanks,” I said.

“However,” said Arni, “only one event chain will lead all the way back to 11:46:01.”

Bean brushed off a few crumbs that Tulip had forgotten to sweep, and started to drum on the table gently with her fingers. “The event chain…what could it have been? Felix loses his duck pacifier and doesn’t like the back-up choice, the banana”—drum, drum—“maybe it didn’t squeak the same way the duck did—and Felix’s complaining prompts his parents to run into a toy store”—drum, drum—“but in doing so they delay an aunt buying a birthday gift and cause her to miss her bus and instead take a car to her niece’s birthday party and accidentally run over the neighborhood cat”—drum, drum—“an event that
doesn’t
happen in Universe B, where the cat goes on to mother a new breed of super-cat destined to achieve dominance over the human race,” she ended, taking a deep breath.

Pleased with the scenario in which I save Universe A from a terrible fate, I applauded, then said, “Well, I’m still not convinced that my parents just took me out for a simple Monday drive up to the city. There had to be more to it. A reason why they closed the gallery and went to San Francisco that day.”

“Unlikely feline world domination scenarios aside, Bean is right,” Arni said. “We need to sit down and brainstorm and make a list of possible event chains.”

“I’ll run some simulations,” Pak said.

“The Universe A receipts should be coming in soon,” Bean said. “We’ll have a better idea of how the day played out.”

“We should study traffic patterns too. And check store receipts—” Arni said.

“—and accident reports—”

“—and the Y-day photoboard, in case we missed something—”

Wolves intent on their chase. I felt a sudden loathing come over me, disgust not at their prying, but at my own. Everyone is entitled to privacy. Even an alter.

“I need to make a call,” I said and went out of the breakfast area into the hallway.

There was a message from Wagner. “Wanted to run an idea by you, Felix. Self-cleaning refrigerator. Remove food, push button, water shoots in from all sides and washes interior. Automatic dry. One more thing. I’m hearing some things—just be careful, that’s all. Oh, and don’t forget the Salt & Pepper Bakery.” The omni beeped to signal the end of the message, leaving me to wonder what Wagner had meant by the warning. He had a large network of professional contacts—everyone had to eat, as he often pointed out—and on occasion those contacts operated in unlikely places.

Everyone knew that DIM’s official motto was,
Information is best managed number by number
. Rumor had it, however, that the unofficial motto was,
Information is best managed by ELIMINATING it number by number
. I suddenly realized how chilling that last verb was. The students had assumed that the computer in Monroe’s attic had been wiped clean by James and Gabriella to ensure that Past & Future stayed ahead of Professor Maximilian’s team. But what if DIM wanted to keep the idea that humans created universes out of the public eye? Removing key evidence from our path was certainly one way of doing it.

I shook my head and made the call I had come out into the hallway to make. Mrs. Noor answered at once.

“There’s been a change of plan, Mrs. Noor,” I said. “I won’t require any more information about—about the party in question.”

“I see. All right. I do have one morsel for you, courtesy of my daughter Daisy, but I understand if you’re not interested anymore.”

Wanting to cut the conversation short, I spoke a tad more abruptly than I intended. “Just send me a bill. And thanks for your help, Mrs. Noor.”

“Call if you need anything else, Felix.”

“Mrs. Noor, wait,” I said just before she disconnected. “What do you have?”

She paused, hand midway to her omni. “You mean my morsel? Just this. Your alter is in Carmel. And he had a visitor join him. His fiancée.”

“You don’t have an alter, do you?”

I received a puzzled look from Bean.

“Never mind,” I said.

We were on a public path that meandered along Carmel’s sandy beach, our way illuminated by a full moon in a star-dotted sky, which might have been quite a romantic experience had Pak and Arni not been a few steps behind us enumerating the defects of outdated computer technology and snickering occasionally. Carmel being the kind of seaside town that shuts down not long after sunset, we had all gone out for a post-dinner beach stroll.

“Do you mind if I ask you something?” Bean said as we walked along the sand-swept path. (I kept an eye out for intertwined couples, checking each time whether the guy looked anything like me.) “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

People always say that, but it makes you look small if you decide that, in fact, you’d rather not answer their question. “Go ahead,” I said, resignedly.

“What are you stuck on?”

“Er—?”

“You
can
write, yes?”

“I can put together a decent culinary user guide, according to Wagner.”

“I meant the mystery novel.”

“It’s not that easy. I mean, on one hand, it is. A murder early on, then another or two to thicken the plot, a sleuth on the case, a few red herrings thrown in for good measure, and finally the climax as the culprit is revealed to everyone’s surprise and you flip your omni shut. I’ve been reading Christie’s
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?
—good title, that—who could catch sight of it and not wonder who Evans was and what he or she should have been asked? Or,” I said, expanding on the issue, since she had been the one to bring it up, “one could go short and to the point, like
The Hound of the Baskervilles
. Conan Doyle, by the way, bestowed sixty-some titles in all—not counting the fairies stuff—and Christie, even worse, eighty mystery novels. Eighty! Where did they find the time?” Various and sundry murder scenarios—to be brought to life in a book, of course—did often drift into my head as I sat at my desk at Wagner’s Kitchen, but I’d quickly remember I needed to pay rent and give my attention back to the vegetable peelers and the rice cookers.

Bean bent down and picked up one of the pebbles lying by the side of the path. She sent it into the darkness of the ocean, narrowly missing a macar tree. “If you don’t mind my saying so—
surds.
”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Irrational numbers. What I mean is, just go for it. Give it a year or two. I’m sure Wagner A will hire you back if things don’t work out.”

“I don’t know about that. Wagner can be pretty touchy.”

“Professor Maximilian too.”

“It’s the chicken-and-egg problem. You can’t call yourself a writer until you’ve posted a book and it’s progressed out of the Read for Free section—or, I suppose, here in Universe B, had a book published—but how do you get there without devoting the bulk of your time to writing? And what if you
do
devote the bulk of your time to writing but people don’t like your book and don’t want to read it? Anyway, I can’t afford to take a year off. I blew all my savings buying a ticket to Universe B.”

Behind us Arni’s voice rose and I caught the words, “One
giga
byte,” and a snicker.

“Sometimes I think I would have been better off in a job that required no writing,” I mused as we continued on. “I might have been more inspired to do it in my free time, if you see what I mean.”

“Like Einstein.”

I raised an eyebrow. No one had ever compared me to the famous scientist before.

“How do you do that? I can’t raise my eyebrows individually, only together. Einstein, early in his career, had trouble getting a job in the field of physics—imagine!—so he worked in a patent office for three years. Gave him time to think and he came up with some pretty momentous stuff. In physics, not patents. Though one imagines he was capably performing his duties at the patent office too.”

We stopped to allow Arni and Pak, who were arguing loudly about the fractal degree of a particularly twisty macar tree, to catch up to us.

“You know what the problem is, don’t you? It’s people,” I said. “If it turns out I did create Universe A, they are going to come knocking on my door, blaming everything that’s wrong in their lives on me. Like I’m responsible for every lost sock or the 8.1 earthquake or spray-cheese coming back into vogue.”

“We have spray-cheese here too. Besides, that’s wrong.”

“No, they’ll blame me. I know it.”

“No, I mean I suppose some people will, but they’d be wrong to do so.” We continued on around a bend in the path and she reached out to touch a macar tree, its dead trunk and branches bleached white by the elements. “A universe is like a bubble. Millions of little random events and daily personal choices buffet that bubble around, pushing on it from within.” She bent down and picked up another pebble and propelled it over the dark rocks into the water, which the moonlight had given an eerie sheen. It disappeared soundlessly. “Most likely the pebble harmlessly landed on the ocean floor. The universe adjusted a little, perhaps. Nothing changed but the spatial position of the pebble. But what if I kept doing it?” She bent down, scooped up a handful of pebbles off the edge of the path, and started flinging them one by one over the rocks toward the water. “Eventually…if I do this long enough…something will happen. It might be simple enough—a pebble might bop a seagull on the head and, startled, it flies in our direction and drops on our heads—er—the processed remnants of its dinner, and so we hurry back to the B&B to wash our hair, thus never having whatever life-changing conversation we are about to have. Or, less personally,” she said, flinging the last pebble wildly and watching it fly in a tall arc across the rocks and disappear into the water, “a pebble could land just
so,
causing a landslide and generating a monster wave.”

We paused to look around but everything seemed stable.

“An event like that would distort the universe bubble,” she said, rubbing her hands lightly to get the sand off, “stretch it to its limit, spawning another universe. We’d end up with the original universe in which no monster wave occurred and another in which it did.
But
—”

The westerly breeze was blowing her chestnut locks into her eyes. She brushed them away impatiently. “But then other prime movers would set off budding event chains and new universes would spout, like a giant tree constantly growing branches, upward and outward. Like Arni said, whoever or whatever the Y-day prime mover was, they are not responsible for
all
the differences between A and B.”

“Do we know that for sure?”

“The link, for one. Professor Singh linked universes A and B moments after they formed. An independent event chain that happened on the heels of yours. Think of all the stuff that we know resulted from that—the formation of DIM, the only inter-universe body. Carmel becoming Carmel Beach here. Nature names rising in popularity—”

“Oh.” I tried to make sense of that. “Still.”

“The idea is not new, you know. If you have the right DIM clearance, you can find it mentioned in old journals and books, all the way back to that ancient Greek, Democritus, and his idea of many worlds. All of us involved in universe-making, like a plethora of Greek gods, even the retired chemistry professor who won’t let anyone park in his empty parking spot at Presidio University. Behavior which really ought to rule you out for god status. What’s the matter, Felix?”