Regarding Ducks and Universes (7 page)

The fly came back and this time I smacked it flat.

A few strides brought me back to Lard’s tour group, which stood gathered far closer to the edge of the cliff than seemed reasonable.

“—the brick towers were completed in fourteen months,” Lard was saying. “Quite a feat.” He had taken off his cap and was holding it in his hand. “The builders suspended a net under the bridge during the construction phase. Nineteen workers fell into the net and lived. Rumor has it they dubbed themselves members of the Halfway to Hell Club.” He paused to let a loud seagull squawk away and I took a couple of photos to aid me in composing inspiring prose that would sell myriads of Bygone Times Sourdough Bread Makers. Lard went on, “The color of the cables and the girder, officially called international orange but which frankly looks more like rusty red to me, was chosen to match the tower bricks. Nowadays, my dear visitors, there’s still plenty of work to be done to keep the bridge in shape. The rain, the fog, and the salty ocean air are constantly eroding the paint and crumbling the bricks.”

“Can’t you paint the cables with permanent paint? Make the bricks watertight?” an A-dweller in the group asked.

“That would be against our policy of historical authenticity. After all, there is only one of these bridges left.” Lard gave a little sniff. “Caretakers who attend to the bridge are quite safe these days, of course. Best of all, we’ll be able to view them at painting work, for a small fee.”

A short murmur of dissatisfaction propagated through his audience, understandably, in my opinion. Having paid a solid price for the tour, I didn’t see why additional fees should be snuck in; $350, the price of a nice book, had already been added to the tally on my identicard.

“Lard, honey, I don’t think people want to pay any more money,” said the sympathetic B-dweller from the bus.

“Yeah, can’t we see the painters from the shore?” someone else said.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Lard consented.

“What about earthquakes? Has the bridge ever come close to falling down, like ours did?” It was an A-dweller in the group who had asked the question. (I was beginning to understand what the Lunch-Place Rule was about.)

“We do as much as we can to preserve the past,” Lard said, straightening his tour-guide blazer with a two-handed tug, “but, yes, steel has been used to reinforce the frame to avoid an incident of the kind that befell the
other
bridge.” He gave another sniff.

Well, really. He made it sound like it was our fault, the 8.1 earthquake that had crumbled the bricks of the Universe A bridge towers, as if we hadn’t been careful enough. Not only unfair, but a downright insensitive thing to say to an audience of mostly A-dwellers. I wanted to retort, “Oh, yeah? What about Yosemite and Yellowstone?
We
haven’t mucked up
our
national parks!” Ferris wheels at both parks, I’d heard, and at Yosemite motorized vehicles to take hikers up Half-Dome and a tourist-enticing elevator to the top of El Capitan with a death-defying drop
down
. “Now just a minute,” I began, but Lard seemed not to hear. The tour group, as if of a single mind, was looking intently behind me.

I turned and beheld a silver flier silently bearing down on us. With a surprisingly gentle bump, given the windy conditions, it landed on a grassy ledge not too far away from where we were standing. One of the doors lifted up from the inside and two DIM officials in avocado-green uniforms jumped out one after the other. Briskly, single file, hands on hats to keep them from flying off in the wind, they strode toward our gathering point.

For a wild second I surmised they were here to take us to see the bridge painters at work.

“Is this the
See B on a Bus
tour, bus number five?” the one in front demanded.

“
See B
from
a Bus,
” Lard corrected her, his mild tone belying his clear annoyance at this interruption of his tour. “And how can we help you?”

“Our records show you have a Citizen Felix Sayers in your party, is that correct?”

Lard thinned his lips. He looked around at his tour group. “Do we?”

“Uh—that’s me,” I volunteered. “I’m Citizen Sayers.” My voice sounded odd, rather high in pitch.

The DIM officials took me by the elbow and led me to the flier.

B
ut I’ve done nothing wrong yet, I kept repeating to myself—there was no one to hear me in the small room where I found myself after being flown to a building south of the city, deposited onto the roof, and hurriedly led down a long staircase—hadn’t broken Regulation 7 yet, hadn’t contacted my alter or followed him or rifled through his trash—or even partaken in a single slice of sourdough bread as a prelude to breaking Regulation 10. Had Mrs. Noor called the nearest DIM bureau as soon as I’d left her office (very Miss Marple-
un
like behavior if true) to report my Regulation 7–breaking behavior? Client requesting information on alter under the pretense of being concerned that alter had already written
his
book, a lame sounding story indeed.

The DIM officials in the flier hadn’t been very communicative. When, in an effort to draw them out, I asked if they were the ones who had tried to reach me at the Queen Bee Inn early this morning, the only reply was a brusque headshake. Somewhat reassuringly, I’d overheard one of them radio in, “Target acquired, on our way,” and not “Suspect arrested,” or anything of that sort.

I looked around the small room. White walls. An exam table in the middle, with accompanying instruments and paraphernalia. Also doctorly advice on several posters. All of the furniture bore the label
Property of Palo Alto Citizen Health Center
. I’d never heard of Palo Alto or their citizen health center, but whoever they were, it was their chair I was sitting in.

After five long minutes, I heard a knock. Before I could answer, the door opened and a B-dweller dressed all in white came in. Without taking his eyes off the omni in his hand, he walked over to the chair I was perched on. “My name is Chang. I’m a nurse. It looks like there are twenty-two of you.”

“No, only two,” I said.

“Hmm?”

“Two.”

He looked at me for the first time. “No, it definitely says here there are twenty-two cases. You’re Number 21. Citizen Felix Sayers, just arrived from Universe A. Your health file should be coming in any second—oh, here we go.” His omni had beeped. “By the way, sorry you had to come down to the health center on such short notice.”

“Notice? I was touring the city on a bus—”

“Right, I heard they had to send a flier to pick someone up. Must have been disconcerting to have DIM officials swoop in like that. Did you think you were on your way to a work camp?”

“I did, rather.”

“Why don’t you sit here,” he smacked the padded exam table, “and I’ll measure your vitals. Dr. Gomez-Herrera should be in at any moment.”

“I think there’s been a mistake—”

“You have nothing to worry about, Citizen Sayers. May I call you Felix? You have nothing to worry about, Felix. This is all just a precaution.”

I hoisted myself up onto the table. I don’t consider myself short, or tall for that matter, of average height really, but my legs swung over the edge without touching the floor. It was a tall table. Chang took my blood pressure, which must have been high, then my temperature, and finally, somewhat strangely, listened to my stomach. He tapped a few omni keys and left before I could get anything useful out of him.

I jumped off the table and went back to the chair.

Dr. Gomez-Herrera turned out to be an imposing B-dweller in her fifties who wore a grave expression that made me highly concerned for my well-being. She took a chair and a moment to glance over my health file, then said, “Sorry you had to come into the health center on such short notice, Citizen Sayers.”

“They sent a flier to pick me up.”

“Have you heard of the North American Pet Syndrome?”

“The—I’m sorry, the what?”

“The media refers to it as the pet bug, though that is a misleading term. It appeared in Universe A about a year ago.”

I
had
heard of it. In fact, I seemed to recall seeing the headline on Mrs. Noor’s desk. The malady, having started among Universe A pets living in the wild (giant squirrels and such), had found its way into human populations and was now on the verge of getting a foothold in Universe B. I was relieved, maybe even more so than when I realized I hadn’t been brought to a work camp, that I wasn’t Number 21 of some new, secret, universe-making experiment that had produced additional copies of me.

“A carrier crossed yesterday into B,” Dr. Gomez-Herrera continued. “We have been trying to contact everyone who may have been exposed. Do you remember a—how did they describe it?—a dog-like creature in the chamber during your crossing? Overweight, white, pink eyes. An almost-dog.”

“The animal touched my hand,” I said, sitting up. “I wasn’t trying to pet it or anything.”

“I see.”

“Does that mean I’ve caught the pet bug, Dr. Gomez-Herrera?”

She paused just enough for my panic to peak, then said, “It’s not a bug. An insect is a bug. This is a virus. And to catch it you’d have to come into extended contact with the animal or its droppings. That doesn’t seem to be the case here. Still—”

“The dog—pet—Murphina—didn’t seem sick.”

“An infected animal usually has only minor symptoms. An infected person, on the other hand, can experience heavy sneezing, loss of appetite, nausea, and intense facial itching.” She leaned forward. “Have you noticed anything like that, Citizen Sayers?”

“No,” I admitted.

Seeming almost disappointed, she sat back in her chair. “Some patients have also exhibited disorientation and abnormal behavior. But that’s rare.”

As I mulled over the phrase “abnormal behavior,” which gave rise to images of patients frothing at the mouth being kept in locked rooms, Dr. Gomez-Herrera got to her feet.

“Wait,” I stopped her on her way to the door. “So you’ll test me for the pet bug just to be sure?”

“There are no tests, Citizen Sayers.”

“None?”

“No. Medication, yes.” She paused with one hand on the doorknob. “You understand—we do not have the North American Pet Syndrome here in Universe B.
Did
not. This almost-dog is the first case we’ve seen.”

And that, finally, explained the flier and the urgency with which I had been whisked to the health center. I didn’t think it had all been for my own good. Feeling the need to apologize for the unwelcome contribution from fellow A-dwellers, even if they were only viruses and pets, I said, “Sorry we brought the pet bug over.”

“Not to worry, citizen. We’ll sort out who is infected and who is not.”

“How?”

“Quarantine.”

I
t was afternoon by the time I found myself alone again.

After Dr. Gomez-Herrera had left me staring openmouthed after her, Chang, the nurse, had returned with the pet bug medication, a thimbleful of purple paste that was almost as hard to swallow as the idea of a forty-eight-hour quarantine. Chang had promised to contact Franny and Trevor at the Queen Bee Inn to have my luggage sent over, then led me to a small wing on the top floor of the health center; whether the guard posted at the double doors was there to prevent people from going in or out, I had no idea. I followed Chang down the corridor, catching glimpses through half-open doors of rooms already occupied, presumably by the other twenty-one patients who’d come in contact with the pet Murphina. My room was at the far end. It looked like I was among the last to be found and brought in.

The next couple of hours, now dressed in a salmon-tinted patient gown, I spent lying in bed receiving far more attention than I’ve ever received at a medical establishment. I continued to feel fine, as I told Chang and other personnel who kept coming into the room to ask questions—” Does your face itch?”—” Have you been sneezing?”—” Are you feeling nauseous at all?”—and made sure to refrain from accidentally scratching any body part in their presence.

As the door swung shut behind Chang for the third time, I eyed my jacket, which was hanging on a door hook along with a bag containing the rest of my clothes; one of its pockets, I’d remembered, held a chocolate bar. There’s something about being in a health center that makes you want to stuff your face: The starkness of the white walls. The utilitarian furniture. The unnatural cleanliness of the place. The aura of other people’s sickness. Besides, no one had warned me about dietary restrictions or brought me a snack.

I got up to fetch the chocolate bar, then got back in bed. Lying next to me was the questionnaire Chang had left regarding my whereabouts since my arrival in Universe B. I ate most of the chocolate bar (no loss of appetite for me so far) and then looked the questionnaire over. Among other things, it posed some
very
personal questions regarding possible exchanges of bodily fluids. I must have been their easiest patient ever. Potentially full of contagious germs, loose on the streets of San Francisco B, free to do anything, what had I done really—fondled a few paper books and stared out a bus window.

Halfway through the questionnaire, I took a break to finish the chocolate bar. I tossed the empty wrapper in the direction of the bedside bin, missed, and had to get up and pick up the wrapper off the floor and drop it into the bin. A quarantine, of all things. I would be a guest at the Palo Alto Health Center until Monday—longer if I came down with facial itching and heavy sneezing—with nothing to do but wait until I got
out
of the Palo Alto Health Center to begin my sleuthing.

At least I had Noor & Brood working on the case.

I was absentmindedly rubbing my lip (where there was a chocolate smudge), when I realized that the action could be misconstrued as scratching and ceased immediately. In response to my new fear of itching, my face and scalp instantly developed thousands of prickly spots, like ants crawling all over my skin. I busied myself with the questionnaire.

By late afternoon, interest in me having somewhat dissipated and the chocolate bar having long been digested, I decided to venture out of my cramped, windowless room in search of dinner. I put on a pair of padded sock-slippers, made sure my gown was tied securely in the back, and went out into the hallway. The math B-dweller from the crossing was standing at the far end, by a door marked
Cafeteria
. She too was in a patient gown and padded socks, and was talking into her clunky omni. As I neared she gave me a nervous grin as she carried on her conversation. “—But Arni, isn’t the direct approach the best?—No, I know we have to be careful…I can be subtle. What? Yes, I do know
how
, Arni—”

After a brief internal debate about the wisdom of eating in a room filled with quarantine patients, some of whom might actually
be
infected with the pet bug, hunger won and I went into the cafeteria. Set out on a long table covered with a plastic tablecloth was the usual warmed-over health center fare, but having essentially skipped lunch, I wasn’t feeling particularly choosy. I picked up a tray and selected a turkey sandwich, rice chips, and a pudding, then looked around for a seat. Murphina’s owner was sitting alone near the cafeteria windows, his willowy form bent forward as he ate his dinner. Like everyone in the room who wasn’t serving food, he was wearing the salmon-tinted patient gown; the revealing and rather coarse garment made me wish I’d thought to pack a robe in my luggage, which had yet to arrive from the Queen Bee Inn.

He looked up as I approached. “Sorry about the quarantine,” he said, making room for my tray across from his lasagna plate.

I sat down. At the very least I wanted to find out why a grown man takes his pet along when visiting the other universe. “Felix Sayers,” I said, keeping my hands firmly on the tray as a precaution against potential pet-bug-bearing handshakes. “I’m just a tourist.”

“I’m Granola James. I’m here on business—”

“No
coffee
?”

I turned my head to see Gabriella Love, the movie star I had shared a crossing chamber with and seen on multiple billboards, expressing dissatisfaction to a cafeteria staff member. “You cannot be serious. No, I do
not
want tea.” She grudgingly accepted something and strode over to a free table, clicking her high-heeled slippers, her satiny pink robe streaming behind her. (Apparently she
had
thought to pack a robe in her luggage.) For a moment I wondered how the famous actress had ended up here with the rest of us mortals, since she didn’t seem the type that would have paused to pet a pet, but then I remembered that I had seen her in Granola James’s car. She was certainly ignoring Citizen James now. She wasn’t the only one. As I opened a mayonnaise packet and spread it on the thin white bread in an effort to make the dry-looking turkey sandwich more palatable, I couldn’t help but feel the stares. At the neighboring table, a couple of kids were having a grand time while their parents looked grim and every so often sent a displeased look in our direction. Feeling sorry for the man, who was (like the almost-dog Murphina and her viruses) a fellow A-dweller, I asked Citizen James, “So where’s Murphina?”

“At the vet, quarantined like we are, poor thing. I hope she likes the food.”

I eyed my sandwich and removed a wilted lettuce leaf. “So what brings you two to Universe B?”

“Business in Carmel. As to Murphina, I take her everywhere. She’s a useful and well-behaved animal. We’d planned to take a flier down to Carmel today, but when Murph woke me up this morning, I could tell she wasn’t feeling well. I took her to the vet. Next thing I knew, I was being rushed here.”

“How did she catch the pet bug anyway?”

Clearly having been asked that question many times, he answered in short, ready sentences, lightly tapping his fork against his lasagna plate. “We live in Napa Valley. There’s a wooded area behind the house. Giant squirrels like the trees. Murph and I take a walk every day. Frankly, she needs the exercise.” The hand with the fork hovered for a moment. “But when she comes across squirrel droppings in the woods, she has a tendency to, well, eat them. No one is perfect.”

“This is silly,” said the math woman, having apparently finished her conversation with Arni, whoever he was, and lowering herself into the free chair between us. She planted her tray on the round table, causing dishes to clatter. “Why don’t we detect diseases
before
they spread from one universe to the other? Instead we get the same old questions when we cross, the purpose of the visit, what’s our identicard balance, does the traveler have an alter in the area—as if it’s humanly possible not to at least sneak a peek at your alter, if you have one—”

She stopped, as if she’d said something she hadn’t meant to. I wondered if she thought one of us—James or I—looked old enough to have an alter. I glanced over at Citizen James, but his lean countenance and slick black hair made it impossible to pinpoint his age; he could have been thirty or fifty.

“Never mind that,” she said and reached for a lemon packet from the bowl in the center of the table. She squeezed it into her glass of ice tea. “Pleased to meet you—”

“Granola James.”

“Pleased to meet you, Citizen James.”

“Call me James. Or Granola if you must.”

They shook hands.

“I’m Bean. And Felix, we met yesterday of course—”

I shook her hand, pleased that she had taken the trouble to find out my name. Was there a chance she had been the one who’d called this morning at the Queen Bee Inn looking for me? If so, why didn’t she leave her name? And who was the other mysterious caller, the curly-haired, prominent-nosed fellow described by Franny?

“At least our quarantine is only forty-some hours,” Bean, examining her soup, was saying, “and not forty
days
, which is how they used to do it in the Middle Ages. Whole ships kept in isolation to ensure no one on board was carrying the plague. We should be able to do better nowadays, though. Detect diseases rather than have quarantines. It would be an interesting math problem.”

James and I stared at her. “Math problem, did you say?” I said.

She took a tentative sip of her soup, then reached for the pepper shaker. “Every problem is a math problem at heart. Some are just trickier than others. Detecting the pet bug—not one of the trickier problems, I imagine—whatever contraption we’d build to do it, what will it measure? A quantity. Body temperature. The number of sneezes per hour, or viruses in a phlegm sample. It would then compare the measured number to a threshold—another number—and make a yes-no decision—a binary one—about whether you have the pet bug or not.”

“Sounds quite doable when you put it that way, Bean,” said James. “An excellent nature name, by the way. Much better than Granola in every way. So what are you? Coffee, vanilla, jelly, cocoa, green…?”

“No idea. My parents are Passivists.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. I shifted my position in the chair as I reached for a rice chip, then had to pull the patient gown down to cover my knees.

“Passivists believe the branching between A and B was caused by a person.”

“It was,” I said. “By Professor Singh. He made a copy of the universe in his basement laboratory. Everyone learns that in first grade.”

“No. I mean, yes, everyone does learn that in first grade.” She dipped a piece of the thin bread in her soup, realized it was too soggy, and left it in the bowl. “Passivists don’t subscribe to the idea that you can make a universe in a lab. According to them, people create universes when they do things without taking into account consequences, like making a careless remark or sleeping in late or running a stop sign.”

I noticed that James’s fork had paused on its way from his lasagna to his mouth.

“There were Passivists at the crossing terminal,” I said. I remembered that she had seemed uncomfortable watching DIM officials ask the Passivists to leave the terminal area. “One of them was carrying a potted sunflower. But what does passivity have to do with names?”

“My parents chose my name by sticking a pin into a list of nature names—the ones for newborn uniques, though usually people go through and choose a name they like. The names are supposed to ‘evoke the sights, scents, sounds, and savories of nature,’” she quoted, stumbling a little over the copious
s
sounds in the sentence. “I’m the savory. Thyme—my brother—is the scent, and my sister Cricket is the sound. There was no fourth child, but he or she would have been a sight. At least they are all easy to spell. Well, except for Thyme. It’s spelled like the herb.”

James put his fork down. “Listen—Professor Singh’s work aside, I don’t think it matters all that much. If there
are
other universes, then successfully avoiding the responsibility of choosing your child’s name means that’s merely the case in
this
universe. In some other universe your parents named you Jane and in another, Hildegard.”

“Thanks.” She pushed around the limp vegetables in her soup. “So what brings you gentlemen to Universe B?”

James apologized again for all the trouble he had caused, and I said, “Curiosity.”

Someone in the room sneezed, and we all turned to look at the guilty culprit. A teenager with large mismatched earrings and spiky eyebrows looked aghast at the possibility that she might have to stay beyond the forty-eight hours of the quarantine.

Bean cleared her throat. “How do you like it here so far? Other than the quarantine, obviously.”

I took a moment to consider the question, because, really, what could one say about a place where one has spent only a day or two, but James, clearly more forthcoming with his opinions, said, “I’ve got to admit—I like all the cars. Rented one myself. A green convertible. Fun to drive.”