Regarding Ducks and Universes

by Neve Maslakovic

  “You haven’t by any chance signed a form giving me permission to contact you?”

  “Er—well, I was considering it.”

  “So you knew I was here in Universe B.”

  “DIM alerts anyone whose alter crosses.”

  “And that’s how you found out I existed.”

  “No, I’ve known about a month or so. Aunt Henrietta of your Universe A left me a Y-day photo, though I seem to have mislaid it. Did you get one too?”

  “I did,” I said.

  “And the dolphins?”

  “Forty-two of them. Some of them are quite large. To be honest, I was hoping she’d left me some money,” I said in a sudden outburst of honesty.

  “I could have used some extra cash too. I’ve been paying for Japanese lessons. My fiancée’s parents are visiting soon and I want to make a good impression when I meet them. Melody—my fiancée—she and I met at a kennel club—here, do you want to see a picture? She’s back at the hotel. I woke up early for some reason.” He went on, “Melody says a honeymoon to Universe A is not in our budget. But you have seen both. What do you think of mine?” he asked, suddenly seeming quite human.

  For a moment my mind was blank. Traffic, laptops, suitcases with wheels, they all seemed too ordinary to mention.

  “Uh—I met a girl,” I said.

  “Well, well. Good for you. What’s her name?”

  “Bean.”

  “She’s a unique?”

  I nodded. Felix was seated nearer to the door and, as the bell chimed and we turned to look at an early morning walker coming in for a beverage, I caught sight of the back of Felix’s head. The experience was like being in front of one of those 360-degree mirrors in a clothing store, only stranger.

  Turning back, Felix repeated, “Well, well. An inter-universe romance. That could get tricky. Though since she’s a unique, at least she can live wherever she likes. I wish they’d leave us alone.”

  “DIM?”

  “Well, yes, though I meant James and Gabriella and your student researchers and their Professor Maximilian who keeps sending me requests for interviews even though I’ve told him I’ve already signed a contract with Past & Future.” He scratched his nose. “Regulation 7 aside, is it even legal for us to be talking about this? As I said, I did sign a contract.”

  “I signed a contract too, with the graduate students, but I dare anyone to inform me that we’re not allowed to talk about universes. I mean, that’s—everything.”

  “James said that reality is essentially a pie.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I asked him for a kitchen analogy.”

  “I wish I’d thought of asking for a kitchen analogy. I’ve been told universes are like bubbles. Also like tree branches.”

  “The pie crust, James said to me, is sturdy and dependable, like gravity. The apple always falls to the ground, never veers off into the clouds. Next, he said, is the pie filling—soft, fluid, comes in many flavors. It’s what life brings to reality. We build parking lots and wear ties and compete for survival. And then there is the random stuff, like lightning strikes. The raisins strewn throughout the pie.”

  “I’ve never eaten a pie with raisins in it,” I said. “Ugh.”

  “I’ve never made a pie with raisins in it. But ultimately it’s just a pie, James said—different universes, different pie flavors. And different pie flavors is where our choices and actions are landing us.”

  “Bean—the girl—said that they’re looking for a small universe maker. I’m hoping they’ll find a universe-making duck.”

  “I know what you mean. Really, what weighty choice could a six-month-old drooler possibly have made? And who needs the spotlight that will shine on us if it turns out to be true?”

  “Then you don’t want to be the universe maker any more than I do? I just assumed, since you signed on so quickly with Past & Future—”

  “I was merely going along with it. Got a trip to Carmel out of it and some spending money for Japanese lessons. They didn’t tell me about this universe-making business until we got down here, anyway. Besides, you signed on too,” he pointed out, raising an eyebrow at me.

  “I did, didn’t I.”

  “Thirty-five years ago we happened to be in the vicinity of Professor Singh’s lab and a photo snapped on the Golden Gate Bridge proves it. So what?” He took an irritated sip of his coffee. “How do we know that a seal or a fish swimming by—or as you say, Felix, a duck on a nearby pond—didn’t do it? Can wildlife create a universe?” he said, frowning (and making me wonder if I had that many lines on my forehead.)

  An omni buzzed and we both reached around our necks.

  “Mine,” Felix said.

  “Good morning, Chef Felix,” said a familiar voice, accompanied by faint barking in the background. “Ready for a new day of research?”

  “Morning, Granola James.”

  “Great day, isn’t it? Murphina and I just got back from a jog. Breezy out there. You having a solitary cup of tea?”

  “Something like that. Listen, what time do you need me?”

  Woof, woof.

  “Murph, I’ll get you a second helping in a minute. As soon as you can, Felix. Gabriella has more questions for you.”

  “All right, I’ll be there in a jiffy. By the way, can Murphina create universes?”

  “You bet.”

  Felix flipped his omni, a classy one that looked like it might have been a recent birthday present, shut. “Sorry, have to go. At least I get to be interviewed by Gabriella Love’s alter. Have you met her?”

  I nodded. How terrible to be known as the alter, not the person. Finishing off what remained of my coffee in a single gulp, I asked, “Felix, do you have your sense of smell?”

  “Yes, why do you ask? One can’t be a chef without a sense of smell.”

  “You’d probably be making a lot of things in your kitchen with cheese, chocolate, and nuts in them. Cherry allergy?”

  “Ah, that I have. No cherries in my kitchen.”

  He swung his jacket over his shoulder and I followed him out the teahouse door and through the courtyard, taking the opportunity to study his form. His body shape was just like mine. A convex middle. The hazard of working in a kitchen, no doubt.

  “What is that?” I said once we were back on Main Street. The fog had started to lift, leaving tenuous wisps hovering over sand dunes at the beach end of the still-deserted street. Nearby stood an abominable structure, three stories of stained, dingy cement. I had not noticed it before.

  “That? Just a parking structure for beachgoers.”

  I thought of Carmel’s orange grove in Universe A, the white blossoms on the trees making their appearance in spring while last year’s blood oranges still hung ripe; the fragrance of the blossoms (I’d been told) outdid the best the Pacific Ocean could produce. A favorite spot for kids during the day and for lovers after dark. The Lunch-Place Rule had promised that things in Universe B would be superior, inferior, or the same. It had been hard to see the old Golden Gate Bridge in its rightful place, an improvement over what was there in Universe A now. Coconut Café had been the same. Worse was the hardest of the three.

  “I should call Gabriella and let her know I’m on my way,” said Felix, turning to go and reaching for his omni.

  “Wait,” I said. “How’s the book coming along?”

  His mouth dropped open and his hand froze midway to his neck. “What did you say?”

  “Never mind, it’s not important.”

  “How do you know about the book? I haven’t even mentioned it to anyone at work yet. Melody is the only one who’s seen it—unless someone has been checking my computer logs or rifling through my trash for discarded edits. Boy, they’re really digging into our lives, aren’t they?”

  “How is it coming along, then?”

  “Not too bad, I suppose.”

  “Oh. Is it cooking-themed, by any chance?”

  “Of course. And mystery-themed. Wait—” He paused
and looked straight into my eyes. “You’re not writing one yourself, are you?”

  “Writing? No.”

  “Good. That would have been awkward. Really awkward.”

  [17]

  PROFESSOR MAXIMILIAN

  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.”

  [18]

  PRIME MOVERS

  “Nine 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.”