Regarding Ducks and Universes (23 page)

The way she spoke, quickly and without thinking, left me with the impression that it was a practiced statement, one she used to convince herself as much as others. As with Gabriella Short, it had to be tough having a rich and famous alter. On the other hand, people are sometimes happy but don’t realize they are.

“What I really wanted to know,” I said, “is whether you remember anything about the restaurant. The Quake-n-Shake.”

Meriwether Mango would have been walking off her cruise and into the Quake-n-Shake shortly after twelve thirty, potentially allowing her storyline to intersect with my family’s as we arrived early at the restaurant. Her alter, Olivia May B, had walked off her cruise at the same time, strolled past the Quake-n-Shake, and headed to her interview.

“I was there with my parents,” I added.

Meriwether gave me a blank look.

“The Quake is where you went to clean your blouse,” I explained.

“What kind of thing do you mean?”

“Anything unusual. A family you noticed in the dining area, a couple with an unhappy baby—”

She shook her head. “Not that I can remember. But keep in mind that I was distraught. I think I was actually crying,” she added composedly. “I don’t recall any of the customers from the restaurant. Is that all you wanted to know?”

I remembered something. “Your alter—Olivia May—she’s taking yoga classes now.”

“Is she?” Meriwether said, seeming uninterested, but I knew better.

“That’s that,” Arni said as the students returned to their desks and I headed to my usual spot on the couch. “She’s been in Jodhpur,” he said to Professor Maximilian, who had just burst in through the door. “Came back as Meriwether Mango, which is why we had trouble finding her. Looks like an independent chain that started with spilled pomegranate juice. I had wondered if your mother, Felix, happened to walk into the restaurant restroom as Meriwether was cleaning her shirt and offered a sympathetic ear or help getting the pomegranate juice off and inadvertently contributed to Meriwether deciding to skip the job interview at Many New Ideas. But nothing like that seems to have taken place—”

Bean clarified, “The event chain being you lose duck pacifier—the Sayers family leaves bridge early—you cross paths with Olivia May—she doesn’t apply for a position at Many New Ideas—omni not invented in Universe A. An easy nine hundred years of consequences.”

“Say what?” I said. “Omni not invented?”

Pak spoke up from his desk. “Olivia May Novak Irving.”

“Didn’t you know?” Bean said. “Olivia May B invented the omni while working at Many New Ideas. It’s named after her.”

“Huh,” I said. “I thought omni stood for, you know, everywhere and everything. After all, everyone does use them and they are everywhere around people’s necks.”

“They weren’t in the beginning,” Arni said, always ready with the history. He was typing as he talked. It looked like he was updating a file. I saw him key in the words
Meriwether Mango. Warm pomegranate juice. Yoga. “I decided there was no point in going to the interview, not looking like that.
” He went on, “Omnis were first designed and marketed for postal carriers. Because of the runaway inflation, prices of stamps changed daily, more than once a day even. New DIM laws were popping up too about which information could be sent through the mail and which couldn’t. Constant updates were needed. That’s where omnis came in. Light, cheap, portable. Good for communication, for updates, and so on. They hung around postmen’s necks.

“Incidentally,” he added, “early models were tried out in the marketplace as substitutes for paper books, but the screens were hard on the eyes and the page turning feature too slow. They never caught on as book readers here in Universe B. By the time the omni made it to Universe A, the technology had advanced.”

“And so paper books disappeared from Universe A,” Bean said.

“But Olivia May Novak Irving with her spilled pomegranate juice is not the universe maker because—?” I asked.

“She’s too massive. Too much matter in Olivia May.” Arni shrugged off the loss of his favorite research lead. “Pity. It’s a nice strong event chain.”

“Is the event chain we’re looking for the strongest one we’ll find?” I asked.

Arni put his hands up and made the universal too-complicated-to-explain gesture. “Well—”

Professor Maximilian, who had been standing at Bean’s desk perusing the textbooks on it (
Bihistory’s Histories
,
Mathematics through the Ages, Bubbles: Soap Making Techniques, The Maltese Poet)
, looked up. “Say Bean here comes in one morning with a runny nose, sneezes, and spreads her cold to Pak.” He pointed across the room to Pak, who was leaning back in his plastic, cushionless and wheeled chair, feet up on his desk, listening to the discussion. “The next day, Pak feels like he’s coming down with something and orders soup at lunch instead of his usual salad. This saves him—the salad greens weren’t washed properly and he would have otherwise gotten food poisoning and died a week later.”

“Not if he used Wagner’s New and Improved Lettuce Purifier,” I said, a little disturbed by the professor’s choice of example.

“From outside of our thought experiment, we know that Bean’s sneeze initiated the fateful chain of events—she sneezes, Pak is saved.” The professor picked up another of Bean’s textbooks (
Shimmy, Gyrate, Undulate—Belly Dancing Exercises
) and peeked into it. “But within the soup and salad universes, this would not be obvious. Consequences are often unexpected and hidden, and decisions that seem current can be part of event chains already set in motion. Are you following?”

“Yes,” I lied.

Pak folded his arms behind his head and said, “Historians in the soup and salad universes, not knowing about Bean’s sneeze, would probably debate whether their two universes diverged the moment I placed my order—or later, when I took the first forkful of salad or spoonful of soup. Or perhaps,” he added, “they would decide that it happened even later, when I either die or don’t.”

“To answer your question, Felix,” Professor Maximilian concluded, “we can’t go by what seems important—the stuff that makes it into the newspaper or the big decisions we make in our lives. The smallest moment may matter.”

“Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin,” said Arni, who had moved to the sink where he was rinsing used tea mugs, “when mold spores landed on a petri dish he hadn’t gotten around to washing. One could argue that a mold spore initiated that event chain by landing on the petri dish, or that Alexander Fleming did by leaving used petri dishes lying around his lab. Probably his parents get the credit by failing to teach him to be neater in his daily life. In order to figure out the real answer, we’d need access to a universe in which Fleming
didn’t
discover penicillin so that we could compare it with ours, see where their histories start to diverge.” Arni tossed the paper napkin he’d used to dry the mugs into a trash bin, making me wince at the casual waste of paper, and returned to his desk. “The first week after Y-day, there was a new speed dancing record set in Hong Kong, a fire on a luxury ship in the Caribbean, an upsurge in bottlenose dolphins migrating past the California coast, and a lightning storm in Caracas—some of those happened in A, some in B. And all over the world different babies were being conceived in A and B. Uniques.”

“Except for Pak,” said Bean.

“Wait, Pak, I though you were like twenty-something,” I said.

“I am.”

“Pak’s a rare breed, an incidental alter,” said Arni. “A post Y-day one. The same two people getting together, on the same day, one couple in A and the other in B, with a particular spermatozoon finding its way to the same ovum, yielding genetically identical persons—well, that’s an occurrence that verges on zero probability.”

“What does your alter do?” I asked Pak.

“Fishes.”

“If not Olivia May’s, what chain did you start, Felix?” Arni thumped his desk lightly.

“Couldn’t Felix B have run into the
other
Olivia May?” I suggested.

“And done what? The other Olivia May did nothing out of the ordinary. She got off the tour boat and went to her interview as planned. Besides, by the time Klara, Patrick, and Felix B came into the Quake-n-Shake for lunch, five minutes past one o’clock, Olivia May B was well on her way to her interview downtown.”

“Part of the problem in pinpointing event chains,” Bean said, wrinkling her brow, “is that no one ever looks at their watch. People are vague observers. They tend to remember if something happened around the moment the electricity went off because of the power sucked up by Professor Singh’s apparatus—but can’t tell you if it was ten minutes before or ten minutes after. We didn’t get a chance to ask Olivia May what time she spilled her pomegranate juice, but I bet she wouldn’t have remembered anyway.”

Professor Maximilian had been frowning at something at Bean’s desk.

“What,” he asked very deliberately, “is this?”

T
hus far during my stay in Universe B, I had acquired two paper books. One was the Agatha Christie which Trevor had insisted I keep and which at the moment was in my jacket in Bean’s car. The other was
Stones, Tombs, and Gourds.
Professor Maximilian had picked up the art book from where I had forgotten it yesterday next to
Shimmy, Gyrate, Undulate
and had been absentmindedly turning its pages. He’d taken something out of the chapter on Japanese pottery and was holding it by the edges.

“Yes, what
is
that?” I repeated the professor’s question. “I found it in the middle of the book. It’s like a narrow postcard.”

“It’s a bookmark,” Arni said, rising to his feet and staring at the object in question.

“They kept it,” Bean exclaimed. “The souvenir bookmark—they were giving them out that day—I don’t believe it—”

Pak coasted in his chair over to Bean’s desk.

“You see, Felix,” Arni said, speaking quite calmly, “there used to be a toll for pedestrians crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, along with the usual car toll. The city needed extra revenue to deal with the runaway inflation. To make up for the unpopular toll, they occasionally gave out cheap souvenirs—balloons one month, key chains the next, and so on. And bookmarks in January of 1986. Most people threw them out in protest of the unpopular tax. Patrick and Klara Sayers, it seems, didn’t. On the back,” Arni added, still very calmly, “there should be a stamp.”

I got up off the couch to join everyone at Bean’s desk. The bookmark was just about the size and color of an uncooked lasagna noodle. One side held a printed sketch of a San Francisco cable car. The professor turned the bookmark over. Along the bottom edge of the otherwise blank flipside there was a row of text. The faded ink, clearly the result of a human hand crookedly feeding paper into a machine, read:

SE 1-6-1986 11:39 $20.00

“Huh,” I said. “I didn’t notice that before.”

The samovar in the corner beeped to announce the readiness of a new batch of tea. Pak coasted over to the appliance in his chair, turned it off, and coasted back.

“That settles it,” Arni said. “At 11:39 the Sayers family was at the south end tollbooth, just crossing onto the bridge. Seven minutes later the yabput happens—”

“We were right, Felix!” This from Bean. “Your parents did take the shorter path to the bridge.”

“How do we know the stamp doesn’t stand for 11:39 p.m.?” I asked, just to be contrary. “Maybe my parents got the bookmark from a friend who went for a midnight walk and who kept it as a souvenir of Y-day. Or maybe my parents were on the bridge at that hour for some reason. We still don’t know why they drove to San Francisco that day.”

Arni shook his head briefly. “The stamping mechanism used twenty-four-hour time. In that case the bookmark would read 23:39.”

“Fine.” I went back to the couch.

“You’re right, though,” Arni added, gingerly taking the bookmark, “about it being a keepsake. This would be worth a lot to a collector.”

“I wish I had a counterpart in Universe A,” the professor said rather randomly as Arni passed the bookmark to Pak, who took it carefully by the edges. “Another bihistorian, I mean. The institute isn’t even there in Universe A, not anymore. The mob—well, you know the story. My alter devotes his time to cooking products.”

I felt an unreasonable desire to defend my boss and his mission of creating and marketing quality kitchen appliances, gadgets, and cutlery. “Have you met Wagner?” I said to the professor from the couch.

“Once. We tried to figure out what chain of events led him to found Wagner’s Kitchen—for instance had the institute
not
been destroyed in A, would he have ended up a bihistorian? I credit a high school class trip to what was then the Physics Institute with inspiring much of my interest in the subject.” Hands folded behind his back, the professor commenced walking in a slow circle around the couch, just like Bean had that first day when I came into her office. “The timestamp on this bookmark places Felix within the event radius a mere seven minutes before the yabput. We can probably confirm that the bookmark belonged to Felix’s parents via fingerprint identification—handle it only by the edges, Bean—”

“Sorry.”

“The bottom line is that this is historical and scientific evidence, which, if destroyed, would be irrecoverable. It is therefore imperative that we preserve the bookmark for posterity and not allow it to fall into the wrong hands.”

“The hands of Past & Future, you mean? Of James and Gabriella?” I asked.

The professor waved Past & Future aside. “They do not concern me. Only one side here has an interest in burying the bookmark. Only one side frowns upon research into the existence of multiple universes and the idea that ordinary citizens create them. It was they who, I believe, tried to wipe blank your parents’ computer in Carmel.”

“DIM, you mean? You want to prevent the bookmark from falling into the hands of DIM’s Council for Science Safety?” I asked. “How do we do that?”

“We might need help on this one. Let me think.”

He proceeded to think, circling.

“No one likes to bring this up,” Professor Maximilian stopped and spoke into the hushed room, “but Professor Singh didn’t tell anyone about the link between A and B for several months, while he—
they
really, the two Singhs—worked on stabilizing the information exchange system. They sent notes back and forth. When the world finally learned the truth—I was fifteen years old and let me tell you, it was an exciting time. The first few attempts at sending an egg across, failure, failure, failure, and then success—and soon enough people were crossing too. It wasn’t long before things started to go downhill, alters disrupting each other’s lives, and everyone turned against Singh and his ideas. The end result, as you know, was that crossings, scientific research, privacy matters, and all information-handling entities became strictly regulated. It’s also why we have DIM agents dropping in for surprise inspections a few times per year.” He rubbed his hands together. “As luck would have it, they are coming by tomorrow.”

I gaped at him from the couch. “As
luck
would have it, did you say?”

“How do we know they’re coming?” Arni asked.

“I have my connections,” Professor Maximilian echoed one of Wagner’s favorite statements. “Tomorrow is Saturday—DIM assumes any unauthorized research would be done on weekends, which is why I always perform my unauthorized research with an open office door, in the middle of the day, during the workweek. It’s a very conveniently timed visit for us. I am going to give the bookmark to the DIM agents.”

“What?” Arni and Bean said in unison. Pak seemed more silent than usual, if such a thing is possible.

“Kids—” It was the first time I had seen Professor Maximilian (or
either
Wagner Maximilian, for that matter) hesitate about what he was going to say. The professor studied the linoleum that marred the floor of the graduate students’ office and rubbed his chin. Finally he raised his head. “This can go no further than this room.”

We all nodded in agreement. Has anyone ever done otherwise upon hearing those words?

“I wish I’d had the chance to meet him. Professor Singh, I mean. By the time I started graduate school the physics department was gone, replaced by the bihistory department, and Singh was at the work camp where he would stay until the day he died. But Singh’s laboratory is still here, undisturbed, boarded up since the day of his arrest. It’s downstairs,” he added, pointing at the linoleum, which struck me as odd since we were in a basement office.

“More importantly,” he added, “it still works.”

“What does?” I said.

“Singh’s equipment.”

“You’ve opened a new, unofficial link between A and B?”

He shook his head. “No, see.”

“See what?” I asked.

“Universe C, not A or B. This way.”