More Walls Broken

by Tim Powers

“You married that Lou Gorba fellow?”

  “A different me, in a different world.”

  “Fair enough.” Vitrielli’s head bobbed gently as he looked around the room. “I should quarantine this house, I suppose.” He tamped the tobacco in his pipe and eyed Cobb over the top of it. “Your Blaine and Ainsworth,” he said, puffing, “should have quarantined Taysha. God knows what pathogens might be unique to one world or the other. Oh well—at least you weren’t antimatter.” He waved at the smoke overhead and said, “You’ve got cigarettes; feel free.”

  “Thanks.” Cobb fetched out his somewhat battered pack of Camels and his lighter.

  Vitrielli went on, “And I—killed myself! That’s distressing.” With his free hand he lifted the glass in front of him and took a sip. “Ainsworth and Blaine may be substantially different people here than they evidently are where you come from, sir—threaten my daughter!—but the similarities are enough that I’m afraid I’ll have to look into their projects more closely, and at the very least begin edging them aside.”

  In the other world, Vitrielli had always called him Clive. Cobb glanced away, and saw that Taysha was eyeing the pack of cigarettes, and he held it toward her so that she could pinch one out.

  “I find I’m embarrassed,” mused Vitrielli, “that you two saw my poor ghost.”

  “My fault,” said Cobb. “I’m very sorry.”

  “Interesting bit of data, though.” Vitrielli pushed his chair back and stood up. “It’s true,” he said, looking over their heads at the framed prints on the wall, “that I’ve been studying transmigration of souls, and I think transfer of a mind to a different body is achievable.” He paused to give them a surprised look. “Well, you two have seen it happen, haven’t you? Luckily I have not told anyone—in this world!—about that possibility. Technomancy today is as discreditable as mesmerism was in the 18th century—”

  Cobb had heard him say this before, and unthinkingly finished Vitrielli’s sentence: “—but Einstein went to séances, and the physicists at CERN make offerings to a statue of Shiva.”

  Vitrielli paused with his mouth still open, then closed it and gave Cobb a baffled smile. “Yes. Precisely. I think we have talked before, in your world.”

  “And I’m in this one now,” said Cobb; “and I’m entirely extra.” He lifted his glass and took a gulp of the bourbon. “Worse than no place for me—there is a place for me, but somebody’s already in it. Probably. I’ll find out, whenever I might get fingerprinted.”

  Vitrielli looked at him curiously. “If you choose to stay.”

  “I don’t see how I can get back to where I came from.”

  “Oh, that.” Vitrielli sat down at the desk and opened a drawer. He lifted out a wooden box Cobb had seen before, and when he opened it Cobb saw, in its velvet-lined interior, a duplicate of the slide rule he had dropped by the backyard faucet in the other world. “And you must very often have touched the doorknob of my office at the Consciousness Research Department in McCarthy Hall, I imagine? In your world?”

  “Yes,” said Cobb. “Uh…yes.”

  “We’d have to remove the doorknob,” said Vitrielli, “in order for me to be able to walk around it, but,” he waved the slide rule, “I do know how this thing works.”

  To his surprise, Cobb only felt deflated. Perhaps he faced no overwhelming challenge after all—just the prospect of finding a new position at another college somewhere. He was looking into the familiar eyes of Vitrielli across the desk, but smoke from Taysha’s newly lit cigarette drifted into his vision from beside him, and he turned his head to look at her. I’d never see Vitrielli—or Taysha!—again, he thought; never again visit this house.

  “But” he objected, without looking away from her, “would I last, there, stay there?”

  He heard Vitrielli say, “Assuming you don’t find the other slide rule and go playing with it—yes.”

  Cobb shifted sideways on the couch, and then found that he could think of nothing to say.

  Taysha smiled sadly and touched his chest with her free hand. “I guess I don’t get to keep you after all?”

  Vitrielli rapped out his pipe in the ashtray. “Blaine said they were in correspondence with…allied institutions? And had applied for grants? And Ainsworth said something about ‘housing for subjects.’” He gave Cobb a direct look. “And that little girl, Lucy, needs to find an incriminating tape. I know where I’d have hidden it, in that car—in the slot above the diagnostic link connector, under the dashboard. Any service technician would find it in a moment, but I don’t think Lucy or…her mother, would poke their fingers in there. Unless somebody advised them to.” He sat back. “Of course it’s not my world.”

  For several seconds no one spoke.

  “That’s all true,” said Cobb. “I guess it was never really—yes, you’re right. Of course.”

  Taysha nodded and looked down at her hands. “Write children’s books,” she said.

  Cobb managed a smile. “Blaine said I should take up fiction writing.”

  “Well!” said Vitrielli. “I can’t get into the building until eight tomorrow morning, so…” He stepped to the window and crouched to open the cabinet below it. Cobb guessed that he was going to fetch out the Panasonic tape recorder he kept there for making notes to himself—and sometimes perhaps taping telephone calls. “We can spend the night comparing worlds.”

  “Clive never heard of The Hunger Games, or Jennifer Lawrence,” said Taysha, “though he keeps up with movies.”

  “Excellent start,” said Vitrielli, straightening up with the recorder and crossing to the desk. “If I dared, I’d give you a DVD of it to take back with you.” He plugged the recorder’s extension into a wall socket, then sat down and pushed two buttons on the machine. “Do you keep up with politics, sir?”

  “Do call me Clive.”

  “Clive,” said Vitrielli, pointing at the recorder, “the wheels are turning.”

  “Right. Well, let’s see…”

  As Cobb began trying to sketch in his recollections of the history of the last twelve years, Taysha yawned and shifted on the couch, leaning her head on his shoulder.

  Vitrielli soon had to open a fresh package of tape cassettes.

  By dawn, Cobb and the old man had recounted everything they could manage to recall about politics, science, movies, books, earthquakes, and even popular songs and ethnic restaurants. There were few discrepancies, and those mostly in areas where one of them would logically be ignorant, though Vitrielli had not heard of the discovery of all forty-two film reels of Von Stroheim’s 1924 movie Greed, and Cobb was delighted to learn that in this world Elon Musk had sent a Tesla automobile into perpetual orbit around the earth.

  Taysha had spent most of the time asleep on Cobb’s shoulder, but woke at a scratching at the door. She sat up and blinked blearily around for several seconds, then visibly recalled the circumstances. “Do they,” she said to her father, then paused to yawn; “have orbital colonies?” When he smiled tiredly and shook his head, she stood up and stretched. “The cats want breakfast. Eggs and bacon okay for the rest of us?”

  Vitrielli’s Buick was blowing white smoke across the driveway. Cobb was sitting on the passenger seat with the door open and his feet on the pavement as he held a cup of coffee in both hands. Taysha stood beside the car, leaning over him with one hand braced on the doorframe. She had said that she would just as soon “make a cat’s goodbye,” and not come along to the university and see Cobb disappear.

  Cobb listened to the engine. “You want to get a new EGR valve,” he said over his shoulder.

  “Noted,” said Vitrielli, fluttering the gas pedal. “But it’ll be warm enough to shift into gear soon.”

  “I’ll remember it,” said Taysha.

  “You’ll find that slide rule,” said Vitrielli, “and—”

  “I’ll find it and destroy it, don’t worry,” said Cobb.

  “And Clive,” Vitrielli went on, “you will remember to tell Allegra there’s no hard fe
elings, right? That’s as important as any of the rest of it, to me. Tell her I always loved her, in every world.”

  Taysha bent down to peer past Cobb at her father. “We all love every one of you too, Dad.” She looked sideways at Cobb. “You could get to know her.”

  Cobb thought of several pointless things he could say, then contented himself with, “Not the same.”

  Vitrielli was now gunning the engine to keep the car from stalling. “I’d have liked to meet my granddaughter,” he remarked.

  Taysha avoided Cobb’s eye as she straightened up.

  “Still,” she said, “I think I might look for Clive Cobb, here. He can’t be too different.”

  “Tell him…tell him to make up for my shortcomings.”

  “That wouldn’t take too much work.” She leaned in and kissed him, then stood back and waved, for her father had clanked the car into reverse.

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