Regarding Ducks and Universes (19 page)

A
couple of hours and one meal later, the graduate students and I had left Carmel behind us and were back at the Bihistory Institute. Felix was already writing a mystery novel, I kept repeating to myself, already writing. Longing for the good old days when I only thought he was trying to kill me, I slumped onto the denim couch in the middle of the graduate students’ office. “Am I going to be able to take my father’s textbook along when I cross back to Universe A?” I held up
Stones, Tombs, and Gourds
limply. It was a heavy book.

Arni picked some lint off his desk chair, a plastic one with a seat cushion, and sat down facing the couch and stretched out his legs. Bean’s Beetle made for a cramped ride. “Nobody expects your information content to be exactly the same on the way back. Not you, not your luggage. It’s theoretically impossible. An extra book is well within the allowable limits.”

“Even though it’s a textbook full of learning and knowledge?”

From the whiteboard where she was busy taping enlargements of 13A and 13B side by side, Bean answered, “It’s nothing compared to the complexity and information content of your brain.”

I took that, at least, as a compliment.

Pak came in, making me realize he’d left the room and sporting a spandex outfit so skintight he could have been earning good money at any bar as an exotic dancer. “I’m off for a bike ride,” he announced. “Keep me posted.” He fetched his bicycle, which stood leaning against the side of his desk, and steered it out of the room as Arni said, “Professor Maximilian should be down shortly.”

In my newly foul mood, I didn’t care if I met a hundred copies of Wagner. Failing to make myself comfortable against the lumpy back of the denim couch, I opened
Stones, Tombs, and Gourds
to a random page, balancing the textbook on my knees. Something inside caught my finger immediately. It was only a little postcard, blank and long forgotten. I moved it to the back of the book, then examined the book’s contents. It was no secret that I had failed to inherit the art gene, but many of the glossy images spread across the pages were familiar from reproductions I’d seen in my parents’ gallery—the much debated Venus of Tan-Tan from Morocco, or the Danube River piscine sculptures, their bulging fish eyes as disconcerting in the originals as I had found them in the clay reproductions in the gallery—and the aurochs and felines from Lascaux cave walls, which made for great posters, were there too. I spent a few minutes fully engrossed in the textbook, having forgotten where I was and why I was there, the highest compliment one can pay a book, I suppose.

My reverie was interrupted by Professor Maximilian swooping in, his personality immediately filling the room the same way that Wagner’s does. He bounded over to where I was sitting on the couch and shook my hand vigorously. “Visualize a sphere centered on Professor Singh’s old lab right here in this building. The sphere includes all classroom and department buildings on campus and extends north about halfway across the Golden Gate Bridge”—he gestured in what was presumably the right direction, though I found it impossible to orient myself in the windowless office—“and juts out west into the ocean and east into the bay. South it encompasses the Presidio Golf Course. And, of course, stretches an equal distance into the air and an equal distance down. Are you following?”

I gaped at him. Listening to Wagner’s double do what Wagner did best—talk—about a subject unfamiliar to me and
my
Wagner was a strange experience, to say the least. I closed my mouth and the textbook and looked the professor over with undisguised interest. He had the same slightly tanned look and untidy blond hair as my boss; instead of Wagner’s well-pressed Peruvian shirts and slacks he sported a cinnamon cardigan and beige chinos, an outfit just as stylish, I suppose, in its surroundings. Professor Maximilian was no taller than Wagner.

Now perched on the arm of the couch facing me, the professor continued, “On this particular Monday morning, inside the sphere we had many potential prime movers: students and professors, research and administrative staff, librarians, campus visitors, maintenance crews, food vendors. It was, however, winter break, so quite a few of the students and staff were absent. Farther away from campus, we had residents of houses that fell within the sphere, also Golden Gate Bridge tourists and tour guides, bicyclists, surfers, Baker Beach nudists, Presidio golf course golfers—”

“Nudists at Baker Beach?” I raised an eyebrow.

“That was before they built the Ferris wheel,” Arni explained.

“—and also cars, buses, trucks, sailboats, and tour boats with their operators and passengers. Who and what else can we add to the list?”

For a second I thought the professor’s question was directed at me, but Bean answered. “Pets and wildlife—dogs and cats, almost-dogs and almost-cats, birds, squirrels normal and giant. Fish and seals, and, though no one reported seeing any, perhaps a great white shark or a whale. Also redwoods, cypress trees, eucalypti, macar trees. Insects. An unstable boulder or two. And other prime movers of the biological and geological kind. More wildly, a meteorite might have fallen into the sphere,” Bean added. She had pulled her wooden chair away from her desk and was straddling it, her arms folded across the chair back. “And I’ve always wondered what lies buried in the Presidio. The land used to be an Ohlone village site, then a Spanish garrison, then a military base before becoming part of the university campus. A lost piece of ammunition buried somewhere could explode one day and cause one heck of an event chain. Other than that, about all that’s left from Presidio’s past are the old gun batteries and the cemetery.”

“We can probably ignore the cemetery occupants,” Arni said dryly, “but they do get occasional visitors.”

“Also rain,” Bean added, “a rogue wave, a particularly dense patch of fog, a hailstorm, and other meteorological occurrences that might have found their way into the sphere. None were reported. Just some benign clouds bringing light rain later that afternoon.”

“Clouds? A rogue wave? Meteorites? This is crazy,” I said. “What could a eucalyptus tree possibly have done? Shed bark? Grown a micro-digit taller?”

Arni got up to stretch his back and headed to the sink, where he commenced rinsing the vase-shaped samovar. “On occasion a little bit of craziness is helpful. As to eucalypti—they are not native to California. They were brought over during the Gold Rush from Australia as a fast-growing source of timber, but the wood cracked and split and didn’t turn out to be suitable for construction or railroad building at all. Today their roots cause all sorts of trouble to foundations of buildings and to underground pipes and also suck up great amounts of water and outcompete other plants. They peel a lot too. I’m sure we could think of plenty of event chains that a wayward eucalyptus peel could cause.”

“So then,” I asked of the room, “anything—furry, bald, alive, dead, liquid, mineral—could have split A and B? No one told me this.”

“Sorry, I thought you understood,” Bean was the first to answer, with a glance at the professor. “Where universe-making is concerned, the important thing is
what
, not who. You or me, a lightning strike, the apple falling off a tree, it doesn’t matter. Most things are part of an existing event chain or are insignificant—a raindrop falls, a bird chirps, you hiccup or have a conversation with an omnimarketer. But every so often it happens—another thread is added to the weave of history,
a new event chain is set in motion
. It might last a second. A few minutes. Millennia. That idea put forth by Past & Future, about an asteroid striking the Earth sixty-five million years ago, well, if it did—
crack!
—a universe split off in which dinosaurs are gone and mammals rule, while in the old one, for all we know, dinopeople are having this conversation. What kind of tea are you making, Arni?”

“Darjeeling.”

“If Hurricane Swilda hadn’t hit Washington, DC, would three-quarter pants have come back into vogue?” she went on. “Had peas not grown well in Gregor Mendel’s monastery garden, would we have the science of genetics and almost-dogs and giant squirrels today? If the great potato chip craze of the nineties hadn’t happened—”

I was sitting up straight on the edge of the couch. This was excellent news. If anything could create a universe, it made it so much less likely that it was me. “What happens after an event chain peters out?” I asked.

“The universe seamlessly merges with similar ones,” Bean said.

“And how do we know the Y-day event chain hasn’t petered out and we haven’t already merged seamlessly? Maybe whatever Felix B or I did—if it
was
one of us—caused a tiny nothingness of an event chain with uninteresting, blink-twice-and-you-miss-them consequences?”

She hesitated. “The length of an event chain is a tricky number to come by. The interaction between our universes has further complicated matters. Having said that, the computer projections for the Y-day event chain are showing an expected length of—this is just a rough estimate, you understand—”

Professor Maximilian, having caught sight of photos 13A and 13B on the whiteboard, leapt off the couch arm and took two quick strides over to them.

“—of nine hundred years.”

“N
ine hundred?” My hands found
Stones, Tombs, and Gourds
and I tried to iron out a page corner that had folded on itself. The aurochs on the front cover, lyre-shaped horns jutting forward, mineral pigment on stone proof of the power of endurance of even the most delicate of man’s creations, met my eye. “Aurochs is singular
and
plural,” I said. “Nine hundred years—so few things survive that long—even buildings—just a handful of books—the
Epic of Gilgamesh
, the Egyptian
Book of the Dead
, the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
…the
Poems of the Traveling Soldier
—”

“Euclid’s
Elements
,” Arni threw in.

“Nine hundred years is mind-boggling, I know,” Bean said comfortably. “But really, it’s mediumish. Halfway between what the pyramid builders in Egypt achieved—four millennia and still going strong—and the forty-six seconds of the average event chain produced by a human sneeze.”

“That last figure has always seemed a bit on the short side to me.” Arni, having left the samovar humming gently, was back at his desk. “It takes that long just to reach for a tissue and blow your nose and look, then you have to dispose of the tissue and wash your hands, all the while worried that you’re coming down with something. Then there are the residual droplets the sneeze leaves on surfaces, which may infect the next person to come along and occupy the space, then that person infects someone else, and so on. A sneeze can generate some pretty long event chains, it seems to me.”

“You wash your hands after sneezing?” Bean said from her desk.

“Doesn’t everyone?”

Professor Maximilian had been studying the two photos Bean had taped side by side on the whiteboard. Without turning around, he said, “On the day Professor Singh was conducting his experiment, counting you and your parents, there were 4102 persons within the event radius—in our sphere of interest, that is. This was the Institute of Physics back then. No better way,” he added wistfully, “to spend a school break, when there are no classes to teach, than to run experiments with universes.” His head moved between the two photos like a woodpecker’s bobbing for worms. “Pacifiers…banana…duck…I see.”

Arni had typed a password into his desk computer to access a database. He tapped the screen with a fingernail as text and images began streaming. “The Y-day database. Scans of the Physics Institute visitor logs. Ocean level and temperature data. License plates of cars that passed through the bridge tollbooths and also a pedestrian count from the tollbooths. Interviews with 4102 persons times two minus anyone deceased. A picture of an English Department printer that went haywire and spewed out endless copies of a Rabindranath Tagore poem that morning…”

“A prime mover disturbs the universe,” the professor explained to the whiteboard, “like Mother Nature giving birth. A new universe is spawned—”

“Please,” I said, “please, no more analogies. I’m having trouble keeping track of them.”

Professor Maximilian turned to face the couch. “Perhaps a demonstration is in order.” In a single fluid motion he lunged forward and punched my shoulder, making me instinctively shrink into the couch. “I do believe I just created a universe by lightly tapping you on the shoulder. In the universes where I gave you a different example, you think nothing of it. Here, on the other hand, you refuse to have anything to do with me until I apologize for violating your personal space.” He chuckled. “I think we can conclude that even after I apologize there’ll still be subtle and long-term consequences in our future interactions, eh?”

It was probably a safe conclusion. As was that there were definite differences between the Wagner standing by the denim couch and my boss, who never threatened to punch me, even if I missed an important deadline at work. “Where did Punch and No-Punch—sounds like an ad for fruit juice—split off
to
?” I asked.

“Where? Punch and No-Punch are both here. They share this room. They share that samovar in the corner. The whiteboard. This couch.”

“None of this makes sense,” I complained.

“Makes sense?” Professor Maximilian said sharply. “Of course it makes no sense. Doesn’t mean it’s not true. If anything it’s less strange than the old view, that one person’s choices irrevocably and forever turn the course of human history, like the assassin’s bullet.” He glared at me with scientific zeal. “Say you go around shooting all kangaroos in sight. Is it more likely that
you
get to decide that kangaroos should be extinct, everywhere and for all time—or that you merely achieved your goal in
this
universe, but there are plenty of kangaroos hopping about in plenty of other universes in which you were never born or in which you were a model citizen?”

Arni, who had gotten up to pour tea into four mismatched mugs, offered one to the professor.

“If you did go around shooting all kangaroos in sight,” the professor said thoughtfully, accepting the mug, “who would be the prime mover, I wonder? I, who gave you the idea, you and I both because we participated in this conversation, or the person who invented the laserinne that you would use to shoot the kangaroos? Or are we an inseparable complex system that constitutes a prime mover as a whole? Never mind that. My predecessor Professor Singh assumed he made a copy of the universe with his experiment. He was wrong.”

The professor put the mug down on Bean’s desk and took two strides back to the whiteboard. With a red marker he drew a thin twig, like a sideways Y. “Singh linked two universes as they branched off. A and B immediately began to sprout new branches because of other, independent event chains.” He deftly drew more branches, spreading and multiplying the Y like a growing crack in a shattered glass window. “This is an important point. What we call Universe A is merely a subbranch of the original A. Because a universe carries with it all of its past history, including the link, each subbranch of A has stayed linked to each subbranch of B—”

“Why is that an important point?” I asked.

“It’s an important scientific point.”

The professor went silent, rubbing his chin in thought like Wagner did when pondering knotty issues such as the right number of speeds in a blender or the optimal capacity of a saltshaker.

Bean broke the silence after a moment. “Professor Maximilian’s research showed that the Y-day prime mover had to be small, around twenty-four libras.”

“My thesis fell through,” Arni said cheerfully. “I was convinced that one Olivia May Novak Irving was the prime mover. I had to start over because of the twenty-four libras. The woman is petite, but not that petite.”

“Why her?” I asked.

“It was a nice strong event chain that started with a boat tour and ended with a missed interview for a lucrative job. That reminds me.” He checked his stylish omni. “Three new messages. Olivia May’s staff making sure I’m on my way over. I’m expected after her yoga class. She’s interested in tracing the pivotal events in her life and I didn’t think I should stop helping her merely because she didn’t fit into our research anymore.”

“Good for you,” I felt compelled to say.

“Plus she makes a generous donation yearly to our research fund.” He drained his tea and grabbed his jacket. “I’ll see you later. Bean, let me know how it goes with the Gretchens.”

Arni’s exit seemed to shake Professor Maximilian out of his trance. He turned toward the door. “Keep things under your hats, kids. It’s hard enough getting any research published these days, much less something as groundbreaking as this. Let’s find the Y-day event chain first so we can show how A and B came to be. You are our best research lead there, Felix—”

“Oh, okay.”

“We’ll deal with the necessary authorizations later. There are universes beyond A and B. I intend to prove it.”

The door swung shut behind him. I was left rubbing my shoulder and noting that the professor had not, technically, ever gotten around to apologizing.

As Bean and I exited the building, encountering a sweaty Pak wheeling his bike back through the front door and into the elevator, I asked, “Where did you say you were going, Bean?”

“To interview a witness to the events of thirty-five years ago.”

“I think I’ll come with you, if you don’t mind,” I said, my shoulder still smarting. This was
my
vacation, after all, and if I wanted to spend it finding out what my parents had been doing in San Francisco on a particular Monday thirty-five years ago, that was my business. Wagner A would have to wait. Besides, engaging in underhanded bread dealing wasn’t part of my job description.

As the Beetle sputtered to life and Bean pulled out of the parking spot and with alarming speed headed away from the Bihistory Institute, I said, “Bean, do you think there is one right job for everyone?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s been shown that there are on average twenty-seven occupational niches in which a person could happily work. Hundreds more in which a person could
un
happily work, of course. I don’t think anyone has researched those,” she said, speeding up further to make a changing traffic light.

“I was thinking of Wagner and the professor.”

“I know what you mean. Culinary companies and bihistory research seem to be about as far apart as you can get, occupational-niche-wise. I don’t know what skills and interests one needs to run Wagner’s Kitchen, but they can’t be substantially different from those needed to run a research group. Both Professor Maximilian and your Citizen Maximilian seem first-rate at their jobs.”

“Strange the choices people make. Agatha Christie started her career as a nurse, Dorothy Sayers worked in an advertising agency, Conan Doyle ran a medical practice, Edgar Allen Poe gave up a military career to write.”

“I suppose we could ask the professor what made him choose bihistory. He was a teenager when the universes diverged.”

“I know.”

“You agree we should ask him?”

“No, I mean, I
know
,” I said, making sure my seatbelt was tight around my chest as she sped up to beat a second traffic light. “I’ve figured out why Felix B ended up a chef and I didn’t. It happened one December.”

“What did?”

“I came down with a sinus infection and lost my sense of smell. And taste, to some extent. Before that—well, one of my friends in the neighborhood, Julia, had a play kitchen. It was fun. She went on to become a financial consultant. But here’s the weird thing. Even if I got my sense of smell back, I don’t think I could be a chef. It seems so stressful. All those hungry people waiting with their forks and knives. Not to mention having to spend all day on your feet. And yet that could be me—
is me
—working at the Organic Oven.” I shook my head.

Bean finally having been defeated by a firmly red traffic light, we had stopped at an intersection; it abutted a small neighborhood park complete with a fountain and a handful of ducks waddling about. I caught Bean’s eye.

She shrugged. “The fountain is within the event radius, but the ducks look too small. Unless they had large ancestors—how long do ducks live? Anyway, I don’t think the fountain was here thirty-five years ago. We’re better off sticking to the fake duck on your pacifier.”

As the light changed and we left the fountain behind us, she said, “What can you taste?”

“Sorry? Oh, taste. There is no rhyme or reason to it. Cheese, chocolate, nuts, yes. Also soup. Any kind of berry, no. Chicken, sometimes. Coffee, always, but bread—I used to love the smell of freshly baked bread. Now it tastes like a clean sponge. Don’t even get me started on pizza. Or crackers.”

“I can see why you ended up writing about food and kitchen stuff. Kind of like doing theory instead of practice.”

“I suppose. If I couldn’t experience it, I could at least spend my time writing and thinking about it.”