Regarding Ducks and Universes

by Neve Maslakovic

  The professor partook of more tea. “I sent through the note with the agents’ questions and soon received a reply from Max D and his agents:

  “Nowhere—you swallowed it.

  “Microphone embedded in food—good for up to sixteen hours of listening time before being flushed away.

  “‘Ah, the logic feature seems to be working fine,’ I said to the two DIM agents.

  “I now knew that the idea would work,” the professor continued his story. “Agents Filbert and Sky, somewhat puzzled, were beginning to show signs of impatience, so I volunteered that I had a newly discovered historical document to turn in. They consulted briefly whether a bookmark, even a Y-day one, constituted a document, before deciding that indeed it did and perhaps took precedence over finishing the inventory. The end result was that they drove me to their bureau where I filled out the necessary paperwork and left the bookmark, along with an art textbook belonging to Felix’s parents.”

  “You left my art book? But I wanted to take it back with me,” I complained, trying to sit up on the denim couch but merely managing to sink into a different spot on it. I had poured smoothie on Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? and now I had lost Stones, Tombs, and Gourds. Except for the glass jar in my backpack, I would be leaving Universe B empty-handed.

  “Sorry. While at the DIM bureau I took the opportunity to point out that similarly abandoned and forgotten books may harbor bookmarks or other Y-day items that an unscrupulous researcher could use for his own ends, say to try to legitimize the ideas of the Passivists. Highly unlikely that DIM officials would find anything of the sort, but it will serve as a distraction. They were typing up a report as I left.

  “Luckily,” the professor added, “if we can count on anything it’s that the Department of Information Management moves slowly. They’ll be back, but by then—”

  “It’ll have started,” Arni said.

  [31]

  NETWORKING

  “What will have started?” I asked from the couch.

  “Max D and I have been up all night setting in motion an omni campaign,” explained Professor Maximilian. On the whiteboard behind him the disembodied sneezing nose hung like the cat-less grin of the Cheshire cat. “Messages are spreading as we speak. My mailbox is already flooded with replies.” Seeing my expression, he continued, “It’s quite simple. I send everyone I know—and I know a lot of people—an epistle, an Ask Me proposition. They forward Ask Me to everyone they know, leading to an exponential growth of recipients. We’ll reach almost everyone in the city by the end of today, I expect, and much of California in less than two days, and farther out by the fourth day—”

  “But what does the proposition say?” I interrupted.

  “Ask me a question, something that no one but you knows the answer to.”

  “And?”

  “I obtain the answer from your Universe D alter.”

  “I think I see,” I said.

  “Your Universe D alter knows everything about your life, every little, insignificant detail—up to late yesterday afternoon, when I bifurcated B and D. I place the questions in the Inbox/Outbox and send them to Max D; he contacts the corresponding alters, gets the answers, and sends them back. Meanwhile, I’m doing the same here, gathering answers to questions from Universe D to send back. Unless people decide we’re mind readers, they’ll have to accept the idea that they have alters out there, alters they don’t know about. Imagine knocking on a stranger’s door already knowing that he dropped a slice of toast butter-side-down on the floor yesterday morning, then ate it anyway.”

  “To be honest, my first thought would be that there’s a DIM agent spying on me,” I said, “not that another version of me happened to know that.”

  “And if I also knew that the reason you didn’t bother re-toasting and re-buttering was not because you were in a hurry to get to work but because you wanted to catch a glimpse of your favorite neighbor on your way out, even though she’s twenty years your senior and happily married?”

  “I don’t have any neighbors like that,” I said for Bean’s benefit. “So that’s it? Omni messages.”

  “All we need to do is to convince enough people. As long as I can, I’ll generate a fresh universe every few hours so I can give up-to-date answers. Universe E, Universe F, Universe G…however many I can get away with.”

  “Where do the building materials for these extra universes come from?” I asked. “The molecules and electrons and whatnot.”

  “Ah,” said the professor, “but where do the molecules and electrons and whatnots in our own universe come from?”

  The graduate students joined him in front of the whiteboard. The nose was erased. Equations were written, diagrams sketched. “Let’s see,” Bean said, “if we compare the expected rate of spread of Professor Maximilian’s Ask Me proposition with the usual DIM response time to these things, we can expect two or three days at the most—how many people can we reach in that time?—”

  “A secret way to pass things between universes. You could do a lot with that,” I commented as they marked and erased and argued back and forth.

  “No,” said four voices at once.

  “I was just speculating on the possibilities,” I attempted to explain.

  “No,” Professor Maximilian repeated. “Professor Singh’s apparatus is not to be used again, not after we are done. This is—an emergency. It would be too tempting, too easy to go down that path. Crossings must be regulated. At some point in the future, when the human race is ready, I believe we will have a whole alphabet of universes to travel to and visit, like we have countries now.”

  “Are we sure people want to know about all this?” I asked the professor.

  “They have a right to know. And they want to know. And do you want to know how I know that they want to know? Because for all the havoc and hysteria Singh’s link has caused, no one has ever suggested simply severing it and disconnecting A and B. What have we done instead? Stabilized the link and opened multiple crossing points. Thirty-three of them.

  “Just think,” he added, “how surprised young people are going to be when they find out they aren’t uniques after all.”

  “I certainly was.” I got up off the couch and walked over to the whiteboard and stared at the equations. “Does this let me off the hook? You don’t need me now, do you?”

  The professor capped the marker in his hand. “It’s not that simple. Ask Me only proves that universes beyond A and B exist, not how they are formed. We need you and your story, Felix, in order to show how A and B came to be. That it’s a natural process.”

  “You need a universe maker,” I said dully.

  Professor Maximilian dropped the marker onto Bean’s desk. “If only we had a clear-cut event chain—”

  “We do,” Bean said, beating Arni to it.

  [32]

  WHAT MADE OLIVIA MAY SPILL POMEGRANATE JUICE?

  “So we never asked the right question,” I said, dialing the number of Meriwether Mango, formerly Olivia May Novak Irving A. “Like in the professor’s Ask Me proposition, the question is as important as the answer. In Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? that is the key question, why did no one ask Evans—”

  “Evans who?” Pak asked.

  “It’s an Agatha Christie book—I doused it with strawberry-banana smoothie.”

  “The strawberry-banana smoothie,” Bean corrected me. She was standing just out of sight of the omni, keeping her hands busy by straightening the stack of textbooks on her desk.

  “Evans is about the adventures of one Bobby Jones, fourth son of the village vicar, and Lady Frankie,” I explained to Pak, redialing. “A man goes over a cliff, all sorts of things happen, but it’s not until Bobby and Lady Frankie ask the key question—”

  “Yes?” Arni said. “Why didn’t this Evans get asked? And what was the question that didn’t get asked?”

  “I don’t want to ruin the ending for you. I admit I rather wish paper books had not vanished from Universe A,” I added as
the faint ringing of the omni began anew. “Interesting things seem to happen around them—the spying by Franny and Trevor, the bookmark placing me on the Golden Gate Bridge on Y-day…Interesting things seem to happen around paper books.”

  “I suppose they do,” Arni said dryly. “One could also say that despite your best efforts to thwart its invention by making Meriwether Mango miss her interview at Many New Ideas, the omni still ended up rendering paper books extinct in Universe A.”

  “I gave it my best shot.”

  “Yes?” Meriwether Mango finally answered from her yoga studio, clearly irritated at being disturbed. “I have a class to teach in a few minutes. I’m doing my pre-stretches.”

  One of Bean’s textbooks toppled over.

  “Are there others in the room?” Meriwether demanded, leaning into the viewframe of the omni. “I specifically requested—”

  “A potpourri of universes—what?” Professor Maximilian, having briefly dozed off on the couch, was jolted awake by Meriwether’s voice.

  “May I?” Arni said to the professor and hunched down next to my chair at Bean’s desk. “Just a single question, please, Citizen Mango.” Before she could refuse, he went on, “What made you spill pomegranate juice that day on the tour boat?”

  Meriwether sighed. “This is really important, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “You won’t believe me,” she warned.

  “Try us,” Arni said.

  “Very well, then. I was above deck—you know how the tour boats have several rows of seats up there—the water was choppy, like I said, but that wasn’t why…we were turning under the bridge and this thing—an object—came flying at me. Landed at my feet and startled me, and I jerked the cup in my hands and spilled pomegranate juice all over my cream blouse.”

  I opened my mouth to speak but Arni nudged me silent with his elbow.

  Meriwether adjusted her position on the mat and moved her omni accordingly, giving us a different view of the yoga studio. She closed her eyes and went into a stretch that seemed to defy the limits of human flexibility. “If you must know, it was a silly little yellow duck. It had a patch on the bottom, like it had been part of a child’s toy. Just came flying out of nowhere. I was convinced someone on the boat was playing a joke on me. I was so angry. But there was no way of telling who it had been. There weren’t any kids near me on the boat.”

  “Did you happen to look at your watch at the moment the duck dropped down on the boat deck?” Arni asked.

  She opened her eyes. “No, why would I? You know, I’ve never told anyone what happened, because it was so humiliating. But that’s the whole story.” She pulled herself up to her feet, picked up the omni, and moved to the studio window, brightening the image and making the fine lines on her face visible.

  “I did it,” I said to the woman whose life had intersected with mine three and a half decades ago.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It was me,” I said more loudly. “Sorry. So sorry.”

  She frowned. “You were on the boat?”

  “On the bridge above.”

  “You—you must have been very young at the time.”

  “Six months. Duck fell off my pacifier.”

  “I see.”

  She spent a long minute staring out the window.

  “Thank you,” Meriwether finally said. “It means a lot knowing that it wasn’t done on purpose.”

  “You’ve helped us immensely,” Arni said, rubbing his hands together.

  “Have I? Six months old—you have an alter, then—Felix?”

  It was the first time she’d addressed me by name.

  “He’s a chef at the newly renovated Organic Oven and has a fiancée and two dogs. Also”—I winced—“he’s writing a mystery series.”

  “Did you keep it, by any chance?” Professor Maximilian demanded, leaning closely into the omni viewframe. “The duck. Did you keep it?”

  She sighed. “I’m embarrassed to say I did. It was such a life-changing moment.”

  “Mango Meriwether,” the professor proclaimed, “how would you like to be more famous than Olivia May, the creator of the omni, ever will be?”

  Leaving behind Arni to mop up the now-cooled tomato soup and Pak to help Professor Maximilian with his Ask Me campaign, Bean walked me out of the bihistory building. She seemed distracted, like it hadn’t sunk in yet that a lot of people were going to read her dissertation after all.

  “Bean, er—you have work to do, I know, but do you want to have a bite of lunch before I go?”

  “How much time do we have?”

  “I need to be at the crossing terminal by two thirty.”

  “Why two thirty?”

  “My tourist stamp expires eight days exactly from when I crossed from A to B.”

  “The Beetle is parked this way.”

  The fog having cleared, the bright sunshine had compelled Bean to warp down the rim of her wide-brimmed straw hat as she drove. I wiped a smudge off my sunglasses and slipped them on, pondering the fact that I had elected to set my mystery novel in a cold, snowy setting, but maybe that was the whole point. You get to write about places removed from your own reality, the act of writing transporting the author, as much as the reader, elsewhere. And what about that old bit of advice, write about what you know? I had gone skiing at Lake Tahoe a few times in my life and knew a fair bit about culinary competitions, but what did I know about murders? Zip. Zero. Absolutely nothing, other than that someone had spent the last week trying to kill me.

  As we left the Presidio behind us, I thought of Professor Maximilian and the stack of questions piling up on his desk. He had promised to keep my name out of the spotlight as much as possible, though I sensed that he did not want to compromise his scientific integrity by completely ignoring my role in the matter. I hoped that Meriwether Mango’s life story, when heard along that of the omni inventor Olivia May Novak Irving, would carry the day and I wouldn’t have to hide out in some backwater Universe Z to escape all the attention.

  Before I could suggest a Baker Beach picnic or a return to Pier 39 for a bite to eat, Bean made a rolling right turn at a stop sign, taking us onto a wide lane with a row of palm trees down the center. She slowed down the Beetle and started looking at house numbers.

  “Who lives here?” I asked, gaping at the elegant villas.

  “Fourteen ten…fourteen twelve…Your Aunt Henrietta wants to meet you.”

  “Don’t be silly, Bean,” I said sharply. “Aunt Hen is dead.”

  [33]

  AN AGED RELATIVE

  A garden path lined with ornamental cactuses and sculpted shrubbery led to a large, well-kept villa. Posted on the front was a doorbell list with the abbreviated names (as per Regulation 3) of the occupants of six condominiums, two condos on each floor. H. S., 1st floor, left. The stained glass, impeccably clean front door was unlocked.

  “She called us this morning—wanted to get in touch with you,” Bean said as we stood knocking on the door of 1st floor, left.

  “Felix B might have thought to mention that Aunt Henrietta B existed.”

  “You’ve met him?”

  “Ran into him in Carmel.”

  “Perhaps he assumed you knew about her. After all, one doesn’t generally say, ‘By the way, so-and-so is still with us.’ Rather the reverse.”

  The condo door opened by itself, allowing us access into a narrow hallway. I followed Bean past a coatrack, an ornate mirror, a cabinet displaying sea-life-themed knickknacks, and into an equally densely furnished living room.

  “Well, sit down,” an old lady commanded from the sofa, putting her door remote away. Henrietta Sayers.

  I sat down into the first chair I saw.

  “No, over HERE, Felix, dear,” Aunt Henrietta patted the cushion next to her. I moved over to the sofa, sliding my legs under a wicker table; on it waited a large leather box and a tray holding three small cups.

  “And take those things off your necks, please,” Aunt Henriet
ta added. “I don’t like to be interrupted.”

  Bean took our two omnis into the hallway and hung them on the coatrack and I took the opportunity to glance around the room. Numerous sea-motif figurines occupied shelf space and dreamlike photographs of jellyfish covered the walls. I was reminded that Aunt Henrietta had spent a long career as a marine biologist.

  Aunt Hen had been my great-aunt Henrietta, a relation through marriage on my father’s side, my great-uncle Otto’s second wife. Uncle Otto had once sent me a remote-controlled, three-speed airplane with retractable wheels as a birthday present, forever cementing the good will of a ten-year-old. He had met Aunt Hen late in life. They had gotten married in their eighties. A framed formal photograph of Uncle Otto sat among the sea-horse figurines.

  This Henrietta, strictly speaking, was not related to me at all, but I could not think of her in any other way than as Aunt Henrietta. She was just as I remembered her, a small, frail, withered dynamo with more than nine decades of life experience behind her.

  As Bean took the stiff armchair I had vacated, Aunt Henrietta reached up and gave me a pat on the head like I was still a ten-year-old and not someone who, even sitting, towered over her. Like my Aunt Hen had, she seemed to have gone a bit deaf over the years and occasionally shrieked a word or two in each sentence.

  “So you are my other GREAT-NEPHEW, are you?”

  “MORE OR LESS,” I said.

  “There is no need to shout, Felix, dear. And I know that we’re not related on PAPER,” she added with a bony-handed dismissive wave of the practicalities of linked universes, “but I’ve always felt we’re family. And this is your GIRLFRIEND?”

  “This is Bean,” I said, moderating my voice. “I’m helping her with her bihistory research.”

  “Are you, now?”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Bean said.

  Aunt Henrietta looked me over. “You’re thinner than HE is.”

  “Thanks,” I said.