Regarding Ducks and Universes

by Neve Maslakovic

  Tuesday morning found me still irritable and I was glad that the taxi driver who took me to Mrs. Noor’s office, though he drove faster and even more recklessly than everyone else, was the taciturn kind and required no conversation.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you, Felix,” Mrs. Noor said and beckoned me into her office. (My omni was still dead.) I sidestepped a filing cabinet and took a chair as she added, “I have good news.” She shifted a stack of papers out of the way and thus having cleared room for her elbows, leaned forward across the desk, ample chin on folded hands, her dark brown eyes on me. “You don’t seem very interested.”

  “People are after me,” I said. “It’s distracting.”

  “You might find this interesting. Felix B was spotted entering the local office of a company called—what was it?” She flipped open the plum-coloured notebook and thumbed through. “Ham, my son, happened to be in his vicinity. Here we go. The company is called Past & Future. An unusual name. It’s not a publishing concern or anything like that. They handle data for corporations and research personal histories for wealthy clients. They also have an idea incubation department—they don’t bother with gadgets or trying to jump on the bandwagon with the next clothing or music fad, only with what they call first-class ideas. They are the ones who came up with that whole dinosaur-extinction-caused-by-asteroid idea last year.”

  “I remember reading about that. It seemed like the kind of thing that might panic the public, the possibility of an asteroid hitting one of the Earths again. I wonder how Past & Future got the idea past DIM.”

  “Money moves mountains,” Mrs. Noor said wisely. “And they have it. Word is, they found the idea in an old science journal, claimed it as their own, and now own the rights to it. If any defense systems are put in place to guard against future asteroids hitting the Earths—well, Past & Future will get compensation for usage of the idea. I don’t know why Felix B was there. Ham is on the case. You don’t seem too surprised to hear about any of this,” she added.

  “As I said, people are after me. Don’t ask me why, Mrs. Noor.”

  “All right. Here is one thing I bet you don’t know. Wasn’t easy to get the information either. Fortunately I have a few contacts,” she said, motioning around the office as if representatives from various walks of life sat arranged on the cluttered shelves just waiting to provide inside information. “I talked to my acquaintances in the book business yesterday, one meeting over breakfast, then two meetings over tea, then a meeting for lunch and then another meeting over tea. Luckily I drink herbal and not caffeinated. I don’t remember when I last spent that much time away from my center of operations here. It will be a little pricy, Felix, what with all the meals that I had to buy.” She moved her large frame and the brown leather chair let out a protesting squeak. “But, to sum it up—there is no manuscript signed Felix Sayers B floating around in the book world. I had them check their records for rejected submissions, aliases, pseudonyms. Nothing. He could be actively working on something at home, of course. Finding that out will require a bit more finesse.”

  I caught sight of the Hypothetically Speaking sign on her wall. Below was a smaller sign which I hadn’t noticed before. It said, Take No Notice. Presumably it didn’t mean of the sign itself. Was it, then, an instruction to ignore other instructions—for instance, could I go ahead and tell Mrs. Noor about the pet bug even though I had been warned not to speak of the quarantine by DIM officials? Most likely, I decided, the sign merely pointed out the obvious, that detectives usually worked on the sly and therefore went unnoticed in the crowd.

  “Felix?”

  “Sorry, my mind is elsewhere today. I appreciate your hard work on my behalf, Mrs. Noor. It’s just that there are things I must attend to.” I sat up in the chair. “You could help me there, however.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I need two things. One, a place to buy an omni battery. And two, where do I find a graduate student by the name of Bean, last name unknown?”

  One of the problems with finding out that you have an alter is that you suddenly feel old, like you’ve skipped back a generation; and you realize that all along you have been thinking of those born before Y-day—there was no other way to say it—as being unlucky. A unique like you knew nothing of their problems and wasn’t even interested since this alter stuff would not affect you, ever; it was your parents’ problem, and that of their friends, not yours.

  That was before I found out I had missed the cutoff.

  As I went around trying to straighten out my fake birth record, my initial reaction had been one of disbelief. (Okay, it was more like panic, but what aspiring writer wouldn’t panic when faced with the prospect of his novel already having been written—by himself, no less?) I hadn’t progressed much beyond that, but the feeling of being older had crept up on me, and I missed being young and carefree like I was only weeks ago. Strolling down the pristine campus of Presidio University, where the Institute of Bihistory was located and where Mrs. Noor had found Citizen Bean Bartholomew listed as a graduate student, did not help matters any. Youth abounded, mostly on rollerblades. I passed a group of what seemed like teenagers sitting on the grass beneath a eucalyptus tree and caught a few words of their biology lecture, given by a professor who herself looked young enough to be a student. I consoled myself that maybe they were teenagers, here to take summer classes.

  As I neared the bihistory building, my omni buzzed briefly to signal a new message. Wagner. The fresh battery was in place and with it was gone the sensation of being disconnected from my normal life, about which I was still of two minds. There is something to be said about being unreachable, especially when you are trying to avoid being prodded by your boss to engage in regulation-breaking activities of the sourdough kind.

  I muted the buzzer on the omni and went in through the front doors of the bihistory building, a three-story rectangular block with wide windows through which people hunched over desks could be seen. I stopped at the lobby infoterminal to double-check Bean’s office number, which, according to Mrs. Noor, was the unlikely combination L-11-C. The infoterminal directed me to the basement.

  I took the elevator down and had turned into yet another deserted hallway looking for Room 11 when I spotted Bean through a door that was ajar. She had her back to me, her feet up on her desk, and was engrossed in a thick, serious-looking textbook with notes scribbled all over the margins of its pages.

  “Knock, knock,” I said from the doorway.

  The feet hit the floor, the textbook slammed shut. “What—Felix, hello. You startled me.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I wasn’t expecting—it’s just that it’s very quiet here in the summer, that’s all. Pak and Arni are at a seminar, won’t be back until later.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Where are my manners? Come in, of course, sit down.” She rose to her feet and beckoned me in, then looked around the room somewhat self-consciously. “Well—there’s the couch, it’s more comfortable than it looks. Or do you want a chair?”

  The basement room was artificially lit. Three desks faced a wall each, a whiteboard stood by the door, and there was a shabby denim couch sprawled in the middle of the room. Several chairs, some plastic, some wooden, stood scattered around. A bicycle had been placed by one of the desks and an electric samovar, stainless steel and vase-shaped, hummed in the far corner next to a stack of mismatched mugs and a sink.

  I took a seat on the couch, my eyes briefly resting on a poster urging, TRACE YOUR LIFE STORY. PhD–RESEARCHED REPORTS AVAILABLE. Bean started to pace around the couch. “I owe you an apology, Felix. We’ve been circling you like vultures, so intent on getting to the truth that we didn’t consider the consequences of what we were doing.”

  “Wolves.”

  “What?” She stopped to look at me.

  “I think I prefer to be circled by wolves, not vultures. I’m not dead yet.”

  “Wolves then,” she said, resuming her pacing. “About the on
ly defense I can offer for being a—a wolf—is that we’re not doing it for the money. Maybe that doesn’t make any difference from your point of view. Whether we do it for the money or for the sake of knowledge, I mean.”

  “Why the secrecy?”

  “The Council for Science Safety—have you heard of it? It’s a subdepartment of DIM—as it happens, we haven’t, er—sought the Council’s approval for this line of research yet. A bit unethical, I know, but Regulation 19 makes things very difficult sometimes. Anyway, officially we in Professor Max’s group are tracking the differences in the development of our two universes.” She rounded the couch and continued, “Many interesting research problems there, by the way. For instance, how did Universe B end up with a surprisingly small number of hurricanes while the nature-conscious Universe A is deluged by them? Or, more trivially but just as interesting,” she said, rounding the couch again, “why is ebony the most popular color for Universe A bathtubs, but pearl for B? And why do B-dwellers have more frequent romantic liaisons? We’ve been running experiments with event chains, seeing where a mislabeled letter or a table with free cookies for students takes us…never mind all that.” She stopped, leaned on the back of the couch, and lowered her voice. “We’re also looking for the Y-day prime mover.”

  “Hence the sneaking around.”

  A pinkish tint appeared on her cheeks. “We weren’t sure you were aboveboard, the way that Y-day photograph appeared out of nowhere. DIM agents sometimes lay traps to ferret out scientists engaged in unauthorized research—those not complying with Regulation 19, that is. Even for the aboveboard stuff, we have to be careful about approaching subjects—people whose histories we need—because of Regulation 3 and other information protection laws. Luckily it’s been a popular thing lately.” She gestured at the poster advertising the PhD–researched reports. “People come by wanting to know how they ended up where they are in their lives. We trace their storyline and in exchange they give us permission to use their life stories in our research. Earl Grey?”

  She walked over to the samovar, turned the spigot, and poured dark tea into two small cups.

  “And James and Gabriella?” I said, accepting one of the cups.

  “Work for Past & Future, an idea incubation company. One of their products is the idea of an asteroid having hit the Earth in the past and possibly one of the Earths again in the future. Before that they cracked the Mayan number system—well, they funded some poor sap to piece things together from old sources and figure out that it’s a vigesimal system, base twenty, and now”—she gritted her teeth—“they get a royalty check anytime anyone translates a date from an inscription. Your alter has signed on with them. Lemon, milk, sugar?”

  “I bet Felix B wouldn’t have signed on with Past & Future if they had exposed him to the pet bug and put him in quarantine. So they too want to prove that our universes were split apart by me and Felix B?” The rhyme echoed in my head like a melody as I watched a sugar cube slowly dissolve in the teacup.

  She turned her desk chair around, an uncomfortable-looking wooden one, and sat down facing me, cup in hand. “People create universes,” she said simply. “What a discovery that would be. Up there with those made by Galileo and Newton and Darwin and Yen.”

  I blew on the tea to cool it down a bit and said, “Let me see if I understand this correctly. You want me as an unpaid research subject and if I sign with Past & Future, I get cash—how much, do you know? Anyway, I answer their questions, pocket the money, and leave—”

  “But you’d be giving them the right to your life story.”

  “And really I could tell them anything or nothing, lies about my childhood if I wanted to.”

  “It wouldn’t be unheard of. People who come in here asking us to research their life stories often keep quiet about embarrassing incidents in their past, stuff they’d rather forget. It’s as if they want us to prove that only the good things in their life brought them to where they are today, not the mistakes they made along the way. We even get Passivists coming by asking for proof they didn’t accidentally cause whatever disaster happens to be topping the news at the moment.”

  I took a sip of the tea, which was strong, strangely satisfying, and apparently named after a British aristocrat, and I reflected that I knew how the Passivists felt. I didn’t want the responsibility either.

  “We’ll have to make it seem like you approached us to trace your life story. It’s a plausible scenario. After all, you did just find out that you have an alter and would therefore naturally be interested in influential events in your life. Uniques don’t come by much.”

  “How likely is it that DIM will authorize your ideas?”

  “It’s just a matter of time,” she said firmly.

  “What’s in it for you?”

  “My PhD.”

  “Do you have to find the universe maker to get your PhD?”

  “No, but it would guarantee a lot of people would read my dissertation, wouldn’t it?” She grinned. “If you must know, the title is Characterizing the Probability Curve of Historical Event Chain Length—”

  “Why not?

  “—but I need more data to test my model. It would be nice if we could spawn off additional universes and monitor the development of events in them. Professor Singh’s lab used to be in this very building, did you know? Unfortunately the Council for Science Safety won’t allow any further attempts at establishing new links.”

  “To be perfectly honest, that’s one DIM policy I’m grateful for. I feel we have one link too many as it is.” I rubbed my forehead; my stay at the health center had left me with a lingering headache. “Do you really think there are multiple universes, Bean? I don’t see that having only two is any less likely than a preposterously large number of them.”

  “It’s not so much that it’s less likely. It’s that if there were only two, they would be a more particular pair, say mirror images of one another. No, A and B are not special in any way, other than that Professor Singh happened to link them. Before he did that, everyone was convinced only one universe existed and would ever exist. Singh said, ‘Look around. Everything belongs to a set of similar or identical objects. People and trees and electrons.’” She looked at me bright-eyed. “No, there are more than two.”

  She pulled an envelope from a desk drawer. “This is how we found you.”

  The photograph had my father standing in front of a steel railing with thick red cables passing vertically behind it. There was a lamppost to his right and some light rain-bearing clouds in the background. Strapped to his chest was a baby carrier. With yours truly in it. All in all, a photo unremarkable to anyone but me (and Felix B, I suppose) except for one thing. I turned it over. On the back, hand-copied from the original, were two items: the photo number, 13, and the date: January 6, 1986. Y-day.

  “Mine is missing,” I said. “Disappeared in the health center.”

  “We didn’t take it,” she said at once. “We didn’t need to. Someone posted it on the Y-day photoboard. You know, the one hobbyists scrutinize for fun to find the earliest visible differences between universes A and B.”

  “Aunt Henrietta must have instructed her lawyer to post it at the same time that it was sent to me. My great-aunt,” I explained. “I don’t think she ever dreamed it would be used in this fashion. I imagine she just felt it belonged in the collection of everyone else’s memorabilia from that day. And this proves—what?” I let the photograph fall down on the desk.

  “Photo 13 places you near Professor Singh’s lab on Y-day. The location is the Golden Gate Bridge—within the event radius.” Somewhat unexpectedly, she chuckled. “Arni was floored that a new prime mover candidate had materialized.”

  “Was he, Arni?”

  “Sorry. I dabble in theory, Pak spends most of his time in front of computers, and Arni is the one who interviews research subjects, gathers data, that sort of thing. After we’d authenticated the photo, we pooled what information we could on you and Felix B; then Arni con
tacted Felix B, but it was too late. He had signed on with Past & Future. In the meantime, since I was traveling to San Francisco A for a conference anyway, I had the task of contacting you, saving Arni the trip. We have to be careful how we spend our grant money.”

  I took in the shabby couch and the mismatched chairs again; only the computer equipment that took up much of the desk space seemed to be up-to-date. She saw, and commented, “Don’t even ask me what I earn. Anyway, I did some discreet poking around when I got to your San Francisco, figured you seemed to be on the level, and decided as good approach as any was to drop in on you at work”—here I suddenly recalled Wagner telling me a client had come in wanting to talk to me on Friday—“but you’d already left. I caught up with you at the terminal—I was scheduled to leave late Friday evening anyway—and, well, here we are,” she trailed off.

  “What about my father?” I tapped the photo. “Is he a suspect too?”

  “He’s the wrong size.”

  Only the steady hum from the samovar and the computer equipment permeated the room; no outside sounds penetrated the basement office. I glanced at the whiteboard by Bean’s desk and noticed a single statistic circled among the equations written on it: 24 libras. My eyes moved to her computer and the palm trees swaying in the screen saver. Behind the palm trees were probably pages and pages of personal data about me—and Felix B.

  “All right,” I said, “I’ll do it.” I couldn’t say why, but I had a feeling that something about this universe-making business would turn out to matter. That is, that it would be important in a personal way, beyond any vast-cosmos and birth-of-new-worlds kind of stuff.

  Bean got up off the wooden chair. “Are you sure?”

  “No. Where do I sign?”

  “Well,” she suddenly seemed hesitant, “it’s customary for research subjects to meet Professor Max first. I’m just a graduate student.”

  “Can I ask you something?” I said as the elevator, with us in it, ascended to the third floor. “What’s the C in your office number?”