Regarding Ducks and Universes

by Neve Maslakovic

  “That last figure has always seemed a bit on the short side to me.” Arni, having left the samovar humming gently, was back at his desk. “It takes that long just to reach for a tissue and blow your nose and look, then you have to dispose of the tissue and wash your hands, all the while worried that you’re coming down with something. Then there are the residual droplets the sneeze leaves on surfaces, which may infect the next person to come along and occupy the space, then that person infects someone else, and so on. A sneeze can generate some pretty long event chains, it seems to me.”

  “You wash your hands after sneezing?” Bean said from her desk.

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  Professor Maximilian had been studying the two photos Bean had taped side by side on the whiteboard. Without turning around, he said, “On the day Professor Singh was conducting his experiment, counting you and your parents, there were 4102 persons within the event radius—in our sphere of interest, that is. This was the Institute of Physics back then. No better way,” he added wistfully, “to spend a school break, when there are no classes to teach, than to run experiments with universes.” His head moved between the two photos like a woodpecker’s bobbing for worms. “Pacifiers…banana…duck…I see.”

  Arni had typed a password into his desk computer to access a database. He tapped the screen with a fingernail as text and images began streaming. “The Y-day database. Scans of the Physics Institute visitor logs. Ocean level and temperature data. License plates of cars that passed through the bridge tollbooths and also a pedestrian count from the tollbooths. Interviews with 4102 persons times two minus anyone deceased. A picture of an English Department printer that went haywire and spewed out endless copies of a Rabindranath Tagore poem that morning…”

  “A prime mover disturbs the universe,” the professor explained to the whiteboard, “like Mother Nature giving birth. A new universe is spawned—”

  “Please,” I said, “please, no more analogies. I’m having trouble keeping track of them.”

  Professor Maximilian turned to face the couch. “Perhaps a demonstration is in order.” In a single fluid motion he lunged forward and punched my shoulder, making me instinctively shrink into the couch. “I do believe I just created a universe by lightly tapping you on the shoulder. In the universes where I gave you a different example, you think nothing of it. Here, on the other hand, you refuse to have anything to do with me until I apologize for violating your personal space.” He chuckled. “I think we can conclude that even after I apologize there’ll still be subtle and long-term consequences in our future interactions, eh?”

  It was probably a safe conclusion. As was that there were definite differences between the Wagner standing by the denim couch and my boss, who never threatened to punch me, even if I missed an important deadline at work. “Where did Punch and No-Punch—sounds like an ad for fruit juice—split off to?” I asked.

  “Where? Punch and No-Punch are both here. They share this room. They share that samovar in the corner. The whiteboard. This couch.”

  “None of this makes sense,” I complained.

  “Makes sense?” Professor Maximilian said sharply. “Of course it makes no sense. Doesn’t mean it’s not true. If anything it’s less strange than the old view, that one person’s choices irrevocably and forever turn the course of human history, like the assassin’s bullet.” He glared at me with scientific zeal. “Say you go around shooting all kangaroos in sight. Is it more likely that you get to decide that kangaroos should be extinct, everywhere and for all time—or that you merely achieved your goal in this universe, but there are plenty of kangaroos hopping about in plenty of other universes in which you were never born or in which you were a model citizen?”

  Arni, who had gotten up to pour tea into four mismatched mugs, offered one to the professor.

  “If you did go around shooting all kangaroos in sight,” the professor said thoughtfully, accepting the mug, “who would be the prime mover, I wonder? I, who gave you the idea, you and I both because we participated in this conversation, or the person who invented the laserinne that you would use to shoot the kangaroos? Or are we an inseparable complex system that constitutes a prime mover as a whole? Never mind that. My predecessor Professor Singh assumed he made a copy of the universe with his experiment. He was wrong.”

  The professor put the mug down on Bean’s desk and took two strides back to the whiteboard. With a red marker he drew a thin twig, like a sideways Y. “Singh linked two universes as they branched off. A and B immediately began to sprout new branches because of other, independent event chains.” He deftly drew more branches, spreading and multiplying the Y like a growing crack in a shattered glass window. “This is an important point. What we call Universe A is merely a subbranch of the original A. Because a universe carries with it all of its past history, including the link, each subbranch of A has stayed linked to each subbranch of B—”

  “Why is that an important point?” I asked.

  “It’s an important scientific point.”

  The professor went silent, rubbing his chin in thought like Wagner did when pondering knotty issues such as the right number of speeds in a blender or the optimal capacity of a saltshaker.

  Bean broke the silence after a moment. “Professor Maximilian’s research showed that the Y-day prime mover had to be small, around twenty-four libras.”

  “My thesis fell through,” Arni said cheerfully. “I was convinced that one Olivia May Novak Irving was the prime mover. I had to start over because of the twenty-four libras. The woman is petite, but not that petite.”

  “Why her?” I asked.

  “It was a nice strong event chain that started with a boat tour and ended with a missed interview for a lucrative job. That reminds me.” He checked his stylish omni. “Three new messages. Olivia May’s staff making sure I’m on my way over. I’m expected after her yoga class. She’s interested in tracing the pivotal events in her life and I didn’t think I should stop helping her merely because she didn’t fit into our research anymore.”

  “Good for you,” I felt compelled to say.

  “Plus she makes a generous donation yearly to our research fund.” He drained his tea and grabbed his jacket. “I’ll see you later. Bean, let me know how it goes with the Gretchens.”

  Arni’s exit seemed to shake Professor Maximilian out of his trance. He turned toward the door. “Keep things under your hats, kids. It’s hard enough getting any research published these days, much less something as groundbreaking as this. Let’s find the Y-day event chain first so we can show how A and B came to be. You are our best research lead there, Felix—”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “We’ll deal with the necessary authorizations later. There are universes beyond A and B. I intend to prove it.”

  The door swung shut behind him. I was left rubbing my shoulder and noting that the professor had not, technically, ever gotten around to apologizing.

  As Bean and I exited the building, encountering a sweaty Pak wheeling his bike back through the front door and into the elevator, I asked, “Where did you say you were going, Bean?”

  “To interview a witness to the events of thirty-five years ago.”

  “I think I’ll come with you, if you don’t mind,” I said, my shoulder still smarting. This was my vacation, after all, and if I wanted to spend it finding out what my parents had been doing in San Francisco on a particular Monday thirty-five years ago, that was my business. Wagner A would have to wait. Besides, engaging in underhanded bread dealing wasn’t part of my job description.

  As the Beetle sputtered to life and Bean pulled out of the parking spot and with alarming speed headed away from the Bihistory Institute, I said, “Bean, do you think there is one right job for everyone?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It’s been shown that there are on average twenty-seven occupational niches in which a person could happily work. Hundreds more in which a person
could unhappily work, of course. I don’t think anyone has researched those,” she said, speeding up further to make a changing traffic light.

  “I was thinking of Wagner and the professor.”

  “I know what you mean. Culinary companies and bihistory research seem to be about as far apart as you can get, occupational-niche-wise. I don’t know what skills and interests one needs to run Wagner’s Kitchen, but they can’t be substantially different from those needed to run a research group. Both Professor Maximilian and your Citizen Maximilian seem first-rate at their jobs.”

  “Strange the choices people make. Agatha Christie started her career as a nurse, Dorothy Sayers worked in an advertising agency, Conan Doyle ran a medical practice, Edgar Allen Poe gave up a military career to write.”

  “I suppose we could ask the professor what made him choose bihistory. He was a teenager when the universes diverged.”

  “I know.”

  “You agree we should ask him?”

  “No, I mean, I know,” I said, making sure my seatbelt was tight around my chest as she sped up to beat a second traffic light. “I’ve figured out why Felix B ended up a chef and I didn’t. It happened one December.”

  “What did?”

  “I came down with a sinus infection and lost my sense of smell. And taste, to some extent. Before that—well, one of my friends in the neighborhood, Julia, had a play kitchen. It was fun. She went on to become a financial consultant. But here’s the weird thing. Even if I got my sense of smell back, I don’t think I could be a chef. It seems so stressful. All those hungry people waiting with their forks and knives. Not to mention having to spend all day on your feet. And yet that could be me—is me—working at the Organic Oven.” I shook my head.

  Bean finally having been defeated by a firmly red traffic light, we had stopped at an intersection; it abutted a small neighborhood park complete with a fountain and a handful of ducks waddling about. I caught Bean’s eye.

  She shrugged. “The fountain is within the event radius, but the ducks look too small. Unless they had large ancestors—how long do ducks live? Anyway, I don’t think the fountain was here thirty-five years ago. We’re better off sticking to the fake duck on your pacifier.”

  As the light changed and we left the fountain behind us, she said, “What can you taste?”

  “Sorry? Oh, taste. There is no rhyme or reason to it. Cheese, chocolate, nuts, yes. Also soup. Any kind of berry, no. Chicken, sometimes. Coffee, always, but bread—I used to love the smell of freshly baked bread. Now it tastes like a clean sponge. Don’t even get me started on pizza. Or crackers.”

  “I can see why you ended up writing about food and kitchen stuff. Kind of like doing theory instead of practice.”

  “I suppose. If I couldn’t experience it, I could at least spend my time writing and thinking about it.”

  “But you want to write mysteries also,” she said, her eyes on the road, sounding puzzled.

  “Why not?”

  “It seems, with all due respect, a completely different thing.”

  “You said,” I raised an eyebrow, “that there are twenty-seven occupational niches in which a person could be happily employed. Maybe Wagner’s Kitchen was the first and novel-writing would be the second.”

  “Touché.”

  “Besides, I have a feeling that food and cooking will creep into it one way or another. Not recipes, I don’t like it when novels contain gimmicks like songs or video every other page. Perhaps a culinary competition as the setting and a broiling pan or nutcracker as a murder weapon.”

  There was a sudden loud noise.

  “Relax, Felix. It’s just the Beetle backfiring.”

  I let go of the dashboard. I had briefly forgotten about Felix B—and his book. Shading my eyes from the bright sun, I dug out my sunglasses. “Honestly, this San Francisco weather, it’s either wet and too cold, or it’s dry and too hot. There’s never a happy mean.”

  “You seem different,” Bean commented, glancing over at me. She changed lanes, taking us out of the Presidio toward Pier 39.

  The Quake-n-Shake Restaurant occupied a coveted spot near the water end of Pier 39 and had an entrance flanked by two tourist shops, one selling sweets and the other T-shirts saying, “I’ve been to the ORIGINAL Golden Gate Bridge.” A familiar creature sat outside the windows of the sweet shop, breathing heavily and drooling down one side of her jaw. At the other end of a taut leash was Gabriella Short. Murphina saw us first and, temporarily forgetting about forbidden delicacies, pulled Gabriella in our direction, making her stagger.

  “Where’s James, sweetie?” Bean bent down to rub Murphina’s pale head and I edged away just in case Murph was still carrying remnants of the pet bug.

  Gabriella, having recovered, tugged on the leash without much luck, the hefty creature outweighing her by a significant amount. She answered coldly, “James is inside getting her a treat.”

  Murphina wagged her fluffy stump at the word.

  “Not chocolate, I hope,” I said pleasantly. Gabriella’s ice-white hair, arranged in a gravity-defying knot on one side of her head, was the exact shade of Murphina’s coat. It was uncanny.

  “They sell pet-safe treats, I’m sure.”

  “Have you been inside?” Bean gestured toward the Shake-n-Quake.

  “Why James and I are here, and whom we may or may not be interviewing, is confidential information. By the way”—this was addressed to me—“I should mention that we don’t make our clients do legwork.”

  “Never?” Bean said evenly, still stroking Murphina’s head.

  “I don’t mind being here,” I said hurriedly. “I’m on vacation. I’m getting to see the city—”

  “Occasionally,” Gabriella went on, continuing to tug on Murphina’s leash, but the almost-dog would not budge, “very occasionally, a client’s help is needed—to get into Monroe’s house, for example—Monroe insisted—”

  There was a sudden shriek, making us all start.

  “I’m not her,” Gabriella snapped. “Go away.”

  Murphina growled and a disappointed movie fan slinked away.

  James came out of the sweet shop carrying a small lumpy bag. He acknowledged us with a friendly nod. “Fancy meeting you here,” he said as Murphina, tail wagging, received her bone-shaped treat.

  “Great minds think alike, or at least follow the same research leads,” Bean said. She went on with barely a pause for breath, “What happens if Past & Future finds the universe maker first?”

  James gave Murph another treat, which she wolfed down in a single gulp. “Chew, Murph, don’t forget to chew. That’s the question, isn’t it? Patent the idea, if we can get permission from DIM. Make the Felixes famous. After that, it’s up to the marketing department. I’m sure they’ll think of ways to make myriads of money off the whole thing.”

  Bean snickered at the candid statement.

  “They are good at making money,” James confided.

  “And we’re not,” Bean said. “We merely want to figure things out and write up the results, then move on to the next problem.”

  “But why is that?” said James. “Nothing wrong with making money. Comes in handy.”

  “I suppose it does. And we do like fame. The science team that found the universe maker. Sounds nice—Nobel Prize nice—doesn’t it? Sadly, not even in the old days, before DIM’s Council of Science Safety dispensed with them, did students get Nobel Prizes. Take astronomer Jocelyn Bell and her discovery of pulsars, or geneticist Fabrizio Minnelli and his invention of giant squirrels while in graduate school—”

  “Are we going into the restaurant, Bean?” I said, feeling left out of the conversation.

  “Of course,” Bean recollected herself. “Interviews to be done.”

  “We’ll wait out here until you’re finished inside,” James said graciously. He stumbled back a bit as Murphina pressed in on him, mooching for another of the bone-shaped treats.

  “Citizen Sayers,” Gabriella sent a final remark
in my direction, relinquishing the leash to James, “don’t forget that Past & Future would be happy to take you on as a client if you decide to nullify your contract with the graduate students. Feel free to contact James or me at any—”

  Bean pulled me into the restaurant.

  [19]

  THE GRETCHENS

  “Now if only you’d asked me thirty-five years ago, I might have been able to help you. You’re a little late,” said Gretchen A, a sturdy, forthright, broad-shouldered woman who gave me a friendly nod acknowledging my A-ness. “Why didn’t you people come by earlier?”

  “We didn’t know then,” Bean said, raising her voice to make herself heard above the din of the dining area.

  Gretchen A indicated the kitchen with her head. “Gretchen is in the back, if you want to talk to her, but to be honest with you, I don’t think she’ll remember your Y-day customers any more than I do—even if we were allowed to give out customer information. Who are you people anyway?”

  “I’m Bean Bartholomew, a graduate student at the Bihistory Institute.” Bean pulled out her identicard and showed it to Gretchen A. “Citizen Felix Sayers here has asked us to research his life story. He wants to know why his alter became a chef and he didn’t.” She paused, then moved closer to the hostess station and lowered her voice. “Gretchen—may I call you that?—if you don’t mind, take your memory back to Y-day. It was a Monday in early January, a chilly day under a partly cloudy sky. Back then, like now, the Quake-n-Shake was a popular tourist spot and operated at full capacity throughout much of the day. On that particular Monday the electricity flickered just before noon and went off for a moment. Some time later Felix’s family came in for lunch. This couple with a baby.”

  Gretchen A shook her head at the photo Bean was holding out. “Dears, I wish I could help you. Look around.”