Angrily driving away, Douglas thought, why should an ape understand me any better than a human?
RAND B. LEE
Knight of Shallows
The alternate-worlds story—taking place in a universe where events have been skewed to a greater or lesser degree from the familiar history we know, an alternate present where the Nazis won World War II or Drake lost to the Spanish Armada or Columbus never discovered America—goes back at least as far as Murray Leinster’s 1934’s “Sidewise in Time.” It includes some of the best work ever produced in the genre, classic stuff like L. Sprague De Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall and “The Wheels of If,” Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee, Philip K. Dick’s The Man In The High Castle, C.M. Kornbluth’s “Two Dooms,” and Keith Roberts’ Pavane. The story that follows, by new writer Rand B. Lee, is a worthy addition to that distinguished list, a taut and exciting tale of a man who chases through the endless worlds of alternate possibility to find—himself.
Rand B. Lee, the son of mystery writer Manfred Lee (who was half of the collaborative team who published as “Ellery Queen”), has sold several stories to Amazing and to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. He lives in Key West, Florida, where much of the action of this story takes place.
They were not at all gentle. “You are a murderer!” they told him, whereupon he told them what they could stuff where; whereupon they said, “We can prove it.” So they dragged him from his senior secretary’s desk down in the bowels of Lifetimes, Inc., and dragged him up many elevators and through many security clearances to a place he had not dreamed existed. It was a room, empty except for a beanbag chair and a wall-sized screen. “We’re hooking you up,” they informed him, although he neither felt any hooks nor saw to what he was being hooked up. “Now look,” they said. So he looked in the screen, and saw, as they say in the Bible.
Afterwards, someone kindly cleaned him up; and they sat him down in a different room and talked it all over. “What do you know about probability mechanics, Roger Carl Shapiro?” they asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “My God.”
“Tell us what we showed you.”
“You showed me some murders.”
“Twenty-three, in fact. Did you see the murderer?”
“Yes.” Dully.
“And whom did he resemble?”
“He was fat and he didn’t have a beard.”
“And whom did he resemble?”
“Abraham Ribicoff. Jesus, guys, what is this, some sort of psych—”
“And whom did he resemble?”
Silence. “Me. He looked like me.” Pause. “Only overweight, and clean-shaven.”
“Anything else?”
“And sad. He looked sad.” Shapiro wept for some time.
When was he through weeping, they said, “What about his victims?”
“I don’t know.”
“Roger, this is important.” [A consultation: “He’s rejecting it. He’s rejecting it.” “Goddamn it, he’s got to accept it.” “Try the back door.”] “Roger, where did the murders take place?”
This was easier. “A bar. It looked like a bar I knew—a long time ago. Beejay’s. On Duval Street, in Key West.”
“That’s good. You lived in Key West for five years, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” Pause. “After I got out of college. I was a bartender for a little while. I didn’t like it, so I left.” Another pause. “But it wasn’t Beejay’s. Bill would never have let them put in that linoleum.”
“Do you remember the bartender?”
A long silence. “Yeah.”
“Yes, who, mister?” [“General, for Christ’s sake.” “General, please.”]
“Yes, sir.”
“What can you tell us about the bartender, Roger?”
“He had dark hair.”
“Anything else?”
“And dark eyes. He was different in some of the pictures. In some of them he had a beard; in others he didn’t.”
“What about his clothes?”
“He had a tanktop, once.”
“And whom did he resemble, Roger?”
“Nobody.” Very quickly.
“And whom did he resemble, Roger?”
“Somebody—maybe—I don’t—”
“And whom did he resemble, Roger?”
“The murderer. The guy who shot him over the counter.” Shapiro put his hands over his face. “They both looked like me.”
Much later they took him back into the featureless room and showed him other things in the screen. This time it was not murders he saw. “Probabilities, Roger,” they said to him. “Probability mechanics is a phenomenon unfathomable to anyone wedded to the old physics. Consciousness as a basic force in the universe. Or rather, multiverse. You’re looking at logical spin-offs from the eventualities of your life.”
They showed him a farm somewhere, with fields growing many kinds of vegetables. It was a commune. He saw himself, digging sweet potatoes. He was more muscular in the picture, although in real life he was not too bad, either. “This is real life,” they said to him.
“I thought about joining a commune once,” he admitted. “East Wind, in Tecumseh. But I didn’t.”
They showed him his uncle’s synagogue, in Bridgeport. He was sitting in the front row with a woman he did not recognize until he noticed the necklace she was wearing. His mouth went dry. “Shirley Greenblatt,” he moaned. “What in hell did I want to go and marry her for?” But the man on the screen looked happy.
[“We’re getting there. He’s starting to accept it.”]
They showed him alone in a darkened room, masturbating. “Hey,” he said. One side of his face was badly scarred; he was sitting up in a chair with his legs bent queerly. The door opened; the man in the chair covered up. A woman came in with a face drained of life, bearing a tray. “That’s Mom. What in hell?”
“We were going to ask you. Were you in a car accident?”
“Jesus. No, never.”
“This ‘you’ was.”
They showed him walking down a street somewhere in a shiny suit, looking prosperous. They showed him standing in front of a group of old people with a black yarmulke on his head. “The last time I wore one of those was when Dad died.” The people on the screen were smiling. They showed him swinging a blond child in the air. They showed him running from a pack of dogs in a bombed-out city. They showed him swinging from a rope, one end of which was knotted around his neck. “Charming,” he said.
“But it happened, somewhere.”
“Somewhere where?”
“In another sequence of probabilities. All these men are you as you might have been—as you might be—if you had made or do make a certain series of choices.”
“No way would I choose to hang myself.”
“Haven’t you ever considered suicide?”
“I’d take pills. I’m a coward.”
“If you had no pills? And were driven to desperation?”
He remembered certain August nights in Key West. “Yeah.”
They showed him a woman with dark hair working at a computer console. “Now that I like to see,” he said. “Do I get to marry her?”
“Hardly. She’s you.”
“You guys are nuts.”
“Not all probability sequences arise from human choice. Some of them arise from natural events: an extra chromosome, for instance, introduced to your biological makeup because one sperm made it to your mother’s ovum first.”
“That’s me as I could have been if I’d been born a woman?”
“Yes. Now most sequences, like the Armageddon scenario—the dog-pack picture—are a combination of your choices, the choices of others, and natural event. You came to work here at Lifetimes, Inc., because the economy is bad and you couldn’t get enough of your articles published to support yourself on your writing. God knows why we hired you; you’re hardly efficient secretary material. A situation arising from many different factors, some of them dependent upon your choices.”
>
“Bull. It was the only thing I could do. I needed work.”
“You could have made it as a writer. You still can.” Roger Shapiro stood up. They waited. He sat down again. “We’ve seen a sequence where you did stick it out and did very well. We’ve seen another sequence where you stuck it out, then quit, became a janitor at a grammar school, went back to writing, and won the Pulitzer Prize.”
“These aren’t actors, then.”
“No. They live and breathe at this moment. The ones who aren’t dead, of course.”
“Where? Not here.”
“No. In other universes.”
After a very long time he said, “What about the murders?”
“What do you think?”
He thought. “If what you’ve been handing me is straight shit, they could be me. Could have been me. The bartenders I saw get shot. Because I did work at Beejay’s for a while, and I guess I might have stayed on.”
“The bartenders were you, all right.”
“Then I don’t get the murderer. He looks like me, too, if I’d let myself go, or gotten real depressed over a long time. Assuming these alternate universes exist, there’s no way I could exist twice in the same one. Much less kill my other self. I mean, why would I want to?”
[A silent chorus of cheers from the observers behind the briefing room wall.] ]
“Twenty years ago, when we started this company, we would have agreed with you.”
“But now?”
“We know it is possible. Not only to view our probabilities, from this screen here; but to enter them.”
He laughed and laughed, and they decided it was enough for one day.
They did not let him go back to his sec desk, but they did not keep him a prisoner, either. He was given a considerable raise in salary, many security passes, and freedom to come and go between 5 P.M. and 8 A.M. The first night he did not go home at all, but sat watching dirty movies in a twenty-four hour theater. The next day they showed him more pictures, without commentary. He saw himself buried as a child in the corner of the family plot in Roxbury, Connecticut. In real life—in his base sequence, as they insisted upon calling it—he had recovered from the pneumonia. He saw himself giving blood in an Army hospital. He had never been in the service. He saw himself working bar in a Beejay’s identical to the one he remembered, until he looked more carefully and saw that the napkins had BIG RED’S printed on them and that his other self had a mermaid leering from his right arm.
He discovered that his apartment had been cleaned in his absence and the refrigerator-freezer freshly stocked. In his bedroom he found a folder. He opened it and drew out some photographs. One was of a diploma with his name on it, issued by a university from which he had not graduated. He had transferred following his sophomore year. The second was of him with a man in a large oval bed. The third was a photograph of a page of manuscript. It was somewhat blurred, as if it had been blown up from a detail. He sat on the edge of his bed and read it; then he read it again.
The next day they said, “Well?”
“I believe you.”
Suspicion. “What convinced you?”
“None of your business.”
“What con—”
“I said it’s none of your goddamn business.” He stood. “Now you want something from me. What is it?”
“Please calm yourself, Roger.”
“Jesus.” He sat, fighting back tears. “Okay. Shoot.”
Carefully. “We’re prepared to show you other proofs: retinal scans, handwriting comparisons, other documents we’ve photographed through the viewers. However, to answer your question in a nutshell: we want you to help stop this murderer.”
“Why me, if you’ll excuse the cliché?”
“Because you’re the only person in this universe who can enter your chain of probability-sequences. And that’s what it’ll take to stop him.”
“Wait, wait, wait.” He viewed them through narrowed lids. “You people can look into my—probabilities—but you can’t go into them?”
Discomfort. “I’m afraid so.”
“How come?”
“We don’t have the time and you don’t have the background for us to explain that satisfactorily. You must accept that we are telling you the truth. We would far rather entrust this task to a trained operative if it were at all possible. That we are asking you to take it on should be evidence enough of our sincerity.”
“Asking me to take it on?”
“Urging you.”
“Ordering me. Coercing me. Shaming me.”
“If you like.”
“Jesus.” He pondered. “I’m not a cop. I can’t fight, and I don’t know how to shoot a gun. And I’ve never killed anyone.”
“We’re not asking you to kill him.”
“You’ve lost me. I thought you said you wanted me to stop this guy from murdering people. Shit—from murdering me.”
“To answer that, we have to answer a question you haven’t asked yet: how can this alternate ‘you’ travel from probability-sequence to probability sequence? In fifteen years of alternate monitoring, he is the first such interfacer we’ve encountered.”
“‘Interfacer’?”
“Dimension-shifter. We’ve assumed that our probability-sequence was the only one in which probability mechanics has been developed. This may sound harsh to you, but the mere fact that you are murdered in sequence after sequence would not be enough to impel us to interfere. It is that an alternate persona is murdering your other selves—that is the crisis. So: how can he shift from sequence to sequence? We assume it’s by the use of equipment similar to that which we have developed. Why do we not want you to storm into a sequence and gun him down? Because we need to know more about him. We need to know whether he is working alone or as the agent of someone else, some other-sequential person or persons. Imagine the possible danger to our universe if there exists an organization or culture of malevolent interfacers?”
“Come on,” said Shapiro. “Come on, guys. Be realistic.” Smothered laughter from behind the wall. “Look who’s being murdered, will ya? Every murder you’ve shown me so far has me tending bar in goddam Key West. What organization of malevolent ‘interfacers’ would waste their time bumping off nobodies?” His interrogators exchanged embarrassed looks. “I mean, I’m important to me and maybe to God, for God’s sake, but who the hell else?”
“We think it might be a test run.”
“Swell.”
“We don’t know. That’s just it, Roger. This is new to us. We don’t know a thing. He could just be a nut. He’s apparently been connected with probability mechanics work in his own sequence; he might even be someone important.”
“Thanks for admitting the remote possibility,” said Shapiro.
“It’s his base sequence that we want to get to. Now we could search among your probabilities-line for eternity and not hit on the right sequence. Or we could send you to follow him home.”
“Follow him home to his universe of malevolent interfacers?”
“That’s it in a nutshell.”
He sat quietly. “I have a lot of other questions.”
“We’ll do our best to answer them in the time we have.”
“How much time do we have?”
“We don’t know. That’s why we’d like to get going on this project pronto.”
“Who’s going to pay my rent while I’m gone?”
“It may not take long enough for that to be a problem, but we’ll support your obligations.”
“My insurance payments, too?”
“Yes. Although why you need life insurance as well as major medical eludes us. You have no dependents or close relatives to benefit from your demise.”
“There’s my uncle, Sheldon.”
“You hate your Uncle Sheldon.”
“How convenient I’m turning out to be for all of you.”
“Does that mean you’ll do it?”
Silence. [Much tension behind the wall.] A grin. �
�Oy. And I thought I was working for a career-planning service.”
[Pandemonium.]
It all had to do with brainwaves and energy fields, none of which Shapiro attempted to understand; to him it was just magic. They implanted things in his head and put a button under the skin of his left hand, which told them when he wanted to talk with them. He was given a weapon and made to practice firing it. They called it a burner; he called it his raygun. To everyone’s astonishment, he was not a bad shot. They tried to give him lessons in self-defense but gave it up when he objected. “I’m not a fighter,” he said. “I buckle under stress.” This statement made them nervous, which was his intent. He watched his probabilities in the scanner by the hour. Most of them varied little from the lives he had glimpsed already; in none did a Lifetimes, Inc., appear. This intrigued him—the company had begun to figure so hugely in his existence that he could not understand why his other lines were not dominated by it also.
“The more improbable the involvement, the less likely it is that you’ll see it in the screen,” they told him.
He glimpsed the Pulitzer Prize sequence they had told him about and several more in which he was female. “Are my probabilities infinite?” he asked them. They said they didn’t know. “May I see into somebody else’s probabilities?” he asked.
Much apology. “We don’t want to risk losing our focus on your sequences. It took a lot of time and effort to lock onto them.”
To which he replied: “You lied to me.”
“What makes you think that, Roger?”
“Maybe ‘lied’ is the wrong word. Omitted some information. To whit: which came first, looking into Roger’s lifelines or stumbling onto Roger-the-Murderer?”
“Uh—”
“Allow me. If you say, ‘Stumbling onto Roger-the-Murderer,’ I will say, ‘How? Were you looking through a catalog of random probabilities and chanced on little Roger’s?’ If you say, ‘Looking into Roger’s lifelines,’ I will say, ‘Why little Roger’s? And who gave you the goddamn right, you warped bunch of voyeurs?’”
Very pale indeed, they told him the truth: they had selected him and a number of other employees of Lifetimes, Inc., without their knowledge, to be part of their experiments in probability-viewing. They had been doing that sort of thing for many years. Each had been chosen for their single, socially unencumbered status and tagged electronically to transmit their brainwave patterns to the viewer complex. “We lock onto those patterns,” they told him, “and they access the probability-lines for us.”
Year's Best Science Fiction 01 # 1984 Page 50