Nest of Worlds

by Marek S. Huberath

  “Ah! I broke a toe on that son of a bitch!”

  “Quiet, Eb,” shushed another.

  More than that Gary didn’t remember. He lost consciousness. He woke at dawn, full of pain. They had broken his nose.

  110

  On the corner of 830 Avenue and 763 Street was an empty lot. It had a closely cut lawn in the center, bushes and trees growing wild on the perimeter, and among them, here and there, rusted pieces of metal, bits of glass, rubble, and trash.

  The lot was once a garbage dump. Later they cleaned it up, leveled it, put in the grass and trees. On holidays public concerts were held here. For a few pence you could sit on the lawn, pant from the heat, and hear deafening music. The music had to be deafening, because on the perimeter the noise of the city would drown out any melody. Gary liked going to such concerts; Daphne didn’t.

  Vendors of ices or hot dogs picked their way among the audience spread out on the grass. The heat was oppressive, humid. Covered with a thick coat of suntan lotion, Gary licked a sour ice. The band ground out its number, torturing guitar strings. They sang of the swill printed in some newspaper, concluding with the sentiment that the newspaper was good only for wiping one’s behind. Nowadays you protested in a crumpled shirt that had buttons missing and in pants that had holes, and you used the foulest language you could. The band was roundly applauded. An obese individual sitting in front of Gary roared bravo until the folds of flesh on his sides shook rhythmically. For the moment he had put aside a greasy cardboard boat containing a sausage.

  How many calories did you burn up clapping? Surely not many. Gary folded his jacket into a ball and put it under his head; he had taken the jacket in case it poured. He stretched out comfortably and closed his eyes. Despite the loud music, he fell asleep—the heat won. He had just completed an exhausting run. He didn’t know the people who were moving, but he remembered a clock with a blue ceramic face and brass columns. For some reason he couldn’t get that clock out of his head.

  111

  Today is a great day! I did it! I discovered the formula behind the number of books in a nested world. If you figured this out ahead of me, Dave, then you’re a brain of the first order, and you can chop farther than the eyes can see.

  I’m no brain of the first order, thought Gavein, and I certainly don’t chop far. He had no idea what the sequence was. It was hard enough following Zef and his number-magic act; he wasn’t about to compete.

  The new numbers helped a lot. Consider them again:

  2, 3, 5, 8, 13, . . . (the dots are the next nesting, which I haven’t got to yet in Nest of Worlds), and now imagine that at the beginning there is something, a number also, because the whole thing may have been set up precisely in this way by the author.

  so we have:

  x, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 . . .

  You see? X must be 1. Add 2 to x, and you get 3, add 3 to 2, and you get 5, and so on. That’s the algorithm! It goes as follows: The next number is the sum of the two preceding. A lovely, elegant rule. I call it Zef’s Series. If not for the current mess with all these deaths, I would be awarded a degree for coming up with such a series and studying its properties. Zef’s Series: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, . . .

  I’ll call Dr. Babcock at the Mathematics Division. What a great master’s thesis this will make. They’ll allow a physics student to do his dissertation in math.

  In Lavath they don’t, Gavein thought.

  That wasn’t the end of the note. A telephone bill was taped to the index card. On the back of the bill, more writing:

  I have this idea, Dave. I won’t tell you it right away, because it’s kind of paranoid. Just read my notes in the order I wrote them. They’re stuck in the places they should be found.

  My idea has to do with the 1 at the beginning of the series of versions of Nest of Worlds. The 1 must be there for the series to make sense. But . . .

  Suppose.

  If the worlds are nested one inside the other, let us posit the existence of a Superworld, a world in which is nested the world where I live, and where Laila lives, and Dave, Mom, and everyone else. Such a Superworld would possess the number N = 0, according to the formula. What follows from this?

  First: the number of Lands would equal 12, that is, 1. In other words, a world with only one Land, and in that Land you would have to stay for the entirety of your life. The Land would be coextensive with the Superworld, since there would be no other Land! With N = 0, the world would be homogeneous, that is, you could travel throughout it at any age.

  The existence of a Superworld is nothing I can prove, but at least my hypothesis is self-consistent.

  Let’s look at the other formula. We find that in this Superworld Zero the number of Significant Names equals 120, that is, 1. Again 1! How is that to be understood, one Name for everyone?

  I looked in the encyclopedia. It says there that the Significant Name is the emblem of a person’s fate. It tells how a person’s death will come. Flued, for example, means “From water,” Udarvan means “From lightning.” No exception to the Rule of Names has been recorded. Had there ever been one, it would have been remembered throughout the generations.

  But one Name only for the inhabitants of Superworld Zero? What could it say about the death of each, so that the information would be common to all, true for all?

  The message could be only “You will die.” Only that information is common to every death.

  To sum up: If there exists a Superworld Zero (a world having the number N = 0), then it is homogeneous, not divided into Lands in which every person must spend a portion of his life. Each inhabitant may live in any place, at any time, in Superworld Zero. And secondly: No one knows what he will die of; he knows only that he will die. What do you think, Dave? Would you like such a world?

  Actually, the difference is not so great, Gavein thought. A Name contains such general information about one’s death that few conclusions can be drawn from it. Only after the fact does it become evident that the Rule of the Name was fulfilled. And the number of Lands? If we didn’t have to move, life wouldn’t be so very different. But it’s more interesting to move . . . You travel, you get to know a new Land, a new way of life. If people didn’t have to move every thirty-five years, a lot of them wouldn’t stick their nose outside their door. Imagine the isolationism!

  He grew serious. Had Ra Mahleiné and he not had to move from Lavath to Davabel, she would not have traveled by prison ship. Would not have been beaten. Would not have got cancer. They would have been a normal, happy couple . . .

  112

  The pistol worked. Gary tried it out at a distant garbage dump. He applied for a gun permit at the police station. Cukurca OK’d the application: the professional opinion of a psychiatrist was needed to establish the existence of a mental disorder—such as a persecution complex—but Gary’s last beating had left clear marks on his face.

  One day Daphne sent Gary down to the Tunics for some chili.

  Jutta led him to the kitchen, rummaged among the shelves. Unlike Margot, she had a thick band of hair on her shaven head, from front to back. It was tied in a braid that fell to her shoulders.

  “Look, Gary, what we just bought,” she said, friendly. If not for their dress and hair, both girls would have been normal, even nice.

  In a corner of the living room stood a tall clock with brass columns and a blue ceramic face. He felt a chill.

  “It was on discount at Morley’s,” she said proudly. “Just for us, because we’re one of their best customers. I love that blue, don’t you? It’s like the clock is smiling.”

  For Gary it was the grin of a skull. And he had never heard of anyone’s receiving an exclusive discount from Morley’s. He said nothing.

  With Cukurca’s approval he got his gun permit. He intended to practice at a police firing range. Unfortunately his pistol didn’t pass inspection. Although he had cleaned and polis
hed the weapon with care, it was more a danger to the person shooting than to the person shot at. The pistol was taken from him, but Cukurca made it possible for Gary to buy a used Lupar Attac, a powerful fifteen-cartridge gun, police-issue.

  Gary paid to take a course on shooting. Every day, unless he was on a run, he’d be at the police firing range. Meanwhile Daphne spent hours at his place working on an article. So he could only meet Sabine right before or right after shooting practice. Balloch, the instructor, said that Gary was making excellent progress, but Gary doubted that. Aiming wasn’t easy, since with his strabismus he had no depth perception. Also, he had difficulty concentrating at the range; he would think about his next rendezvous with Sabine, or about how much time he could spend with her without Daphne growing suspicious.

  Sabine, as he got to know her better and won her over more, became more and more interesting. She had a good body: slender hips, shapely breasts. There were some freckles on her back and chest—but a lot fewer than Daphne had. She was full of life and quite intelligent. When he stopped noticing her colorless hair and pink eyes, he saw a lovely girl.

  Obviously this arrangement could not go on forever: an hour here, an hour there wasn’t enough for Sabine. Gary knew what he should do, but out of laziness or cowardice, or both, he put off speaking with Daphne.

  113

  Talk about cold water in my face. My notes could be published under the title “Letters from Zef to Dave about the Book; or, The Wave Theory of Stupidity.”

  Babcock informed me that my topic is an old idea. Two hundred years old. Some Bonacci Junior, professor at a university in Llanaig, came up with the series. And he did it better than I did, because mine doesn’t begin at the beginning. I should have figured that out, damn it!

  The correct series is:

  1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, . . .

  You need two 1s at the beginning for their sum to make 2. The author of Nest of Worlds knew this form of the series, having had at his disposal the works of Bonacci Junior.

  114

  Daphne worked till dawn. The article had grown considerably—it could be published now in two or three hefty installments. She kept making corrections and retyped the most marked-up pages. Gary couldn’t doze off because of the clatter of the keys. But he had to stay there; Daphne wouldn’t allow him to go lie down. He spent the night in the armchair, drinking beer after beer as long as there were cans in the refrigerator. When he closed his eyes, he saw Sabine’s breasts, then stopped seeing them—only gray fatigue was left, and the beer ran out.

  Daphne, bent over the machine, muttered phrases. Sometimes she crossed or whited something out and put a new page in the noisy roller. She was exhausted, but the end was in sight, so she couldn’t stop. Cold sweat covered her pale forehead.

  Sunlight was coming in when she sat back with relief and said, “Finally.” She smiled at him and made a circle with thumb and finger.

  Gary lifted his weary, swollen eyes and gave a weak smile. “Tomorrow it begins,” he said. “We’ll get police protection, for sure, against the gang. I’ll take this to Cukurca.”

  “Day after tomorrow. It won’t make tomorrow’s paper.”

  He nodded agreement. Then his head fell, and he was snoring.

  Daphne put the manuscript in order, threw off most of her clothes, and wriggled under the cold blanket. She had trouble sleeping, because it was getting brighter with every minute, the night retreating to the dark corners. She shivered, first from the cold, then from the tormenting pang of hunger, then all sorts of disconnected thoughts ran through her head. At last she lost hold of reality.

  115

  At the publisher, she spoke to the man who had temporarily replaced the editor-in-chief. Her article was rejected—that is, it was accepted, but only on the condition of so many changes that she would have had to redo the whole thing.

  The basic thesis, of a gang who murdered and robbed people who moved, was well substantiated, carefully argued, so there was no chance of a lawsuit. The editor’s criticisms concerned smaller matters: the style, the vocabulary.

  Gary said that this was the typical fault finding crap you got from editors. Daphne threw the papers to the floor in a fury and said she couldn’t look at the article anymore. But they had to fix it without delay, because the substitute editor had given them only three days, and they had a run scheduled soon. Gary took the manuscript to his place. He put it on an end table and dropped into bed. After a night without sleep, he slept like a stone.

  116

  He was woken by people moving around suspiciously and a burnt smell. It was evening. He jumped up, and immediately his chin met with a fist. A flash of yellow, and he was on the floor. When he tried to get up, someone grabbed him by the collar, and another blow followed.

  “You’re a truck driver, you shit, not a writer.” The words reached him between blows.

  The Tunics again, he thought. This time they’ll finish me off . . .

  They were thorough. Each time he fell, he was kicked in the ribs and thighs. As with the last beating, the pain deprived him of the will to fight. Someone kept pulling him up by his pajamas, and there was another burst of yellow, and he lost consciousness.

  “Where’s the copy?”

  “No copy,” he said, which was true, though it brought another blow. “There isn’t any.” It was too bad that Daphne hadn’t made one. A carbon copy would have satisfied the thugs.

  “Stack, he’s telling the truth,” said a muffled voice. “Let’s take it and get out of here.”

  A lot of footsteps.

  He came to his senses quickly and ran to the dresser for the pistol. He had to get the manuscript back. The pistol was there—the attackers hadn’t found it. Running out, he removed the safety.

  Eby was coming toward him up the steps. Apparently he had forgot something. He wore no mask. Gary shot him in the stomach. Eby waved his arms and made a face, as if astonished. Gary elbowed him aside and ran downstairs. He kicked open the door to the apartment on the ground floor. Stack and the third guy turned. They had managed to get rid of their masks.

  “You sons of bitches!” Gary roared. “Give me that manuscript! The article!” Aiming at Stack.

  “What article? What are you talking about, Gary?” Stack turned as green as his tunic. He stood rigid, at attention.

  Gary’s finger must have moved on the trigger, because a shot rang out. Not a shot, a series of shots. Stack clutched his chest and dropped to his knees. Then he was facedown on the floor.

  Margot ran in from the kitchen. A bullet caught her as she ran. More bullets flew, whistling. Jutta tried to crawl behind an armchair but didn’t make it. The last of the Tunics took three bullets: in his head, neck, and arm.

  Gary looked down at his gun. It was too easy. When had he pulled the trigger? When had he aimed? The weapon was not completely recoilless—he would have felt himself shooting. He remembered one shot, on the stairs, at Eby, but only that one.

  He stood, stunned. A police siren sounded in the street. Soon after, someone pinned his arms, someone else took away the pistol, and a third someone put handcuffs on him.

  117

  He waited in the cell until evening. Cukurca conducted the interrogation. He didn’t believe Gary’s story, because, as before, Gary had been beaten professionally, without marks. The notes and materials for the article were gone. The manuscript itself had burned, ignited by a cigarette. A charred hole in the upholstery was all that remained of it.

  Cukurca expressed doubt that Gary had the ability to gun down his neighbors so efficiently, but he was withholding judgment until he heard from the ballistics expert. Gary’s story did not seem very likely. Fortunately most of the fired bullets were recovered. Gary claimed he had shot Eby only once, but three bullets were found in the body: in the stomach, the middle of the forehead, and the ribcage. Eleven bullets in all had been fired. The magazine of the
police-issue Lupar Attac held fifteen rounds, and there were indeed four left in Gary’s pistol.

  Gary asked to speak to Daphne, but that turned out to be impossible. Apparently, after his arrest, Sabine had called her, unaware that he and Daphne were a couple. The affair came to light, and Daphne would have nothing more to do with him.

  118

  I couldn’t sleep because of Bonacci Junior’s series. The author of Nest of Worlds made use of it, so he must have had some concept of Superworld Zero and Superworld Minus One. Superworld Zero doesn’t present that much of a problem, but Superworld Minus One (required by the first 1 in Bonacci’s series) seems totally absurd. From the formulas you get nonsense: the number of Lands in Superworld Minus One equals zero. The number of Significant Names is 12-1 = 1/12. Nonsense too. From this I draw the simple conclusion: the author of Nest of Worlds devised his laws so that Superworld Minus One would constitute a breach of logic!

  Gavein bent back the second half of the card.

  Zef had taped on another card: notes written later, perhaps that same day, or else he had taped it to continue his reasoning then and there.

  Babcock allowed me access to the division’s computer. That is, to the library of programs available only to the sharks. Though I am a lowly graduate student!

  In less than three-quarters of an hour I had the formula for length of time spent in a Land.

  The number of years spent in a Land = 140/(N + 1)2.

  With good accuracy this accounts for the time one must live in each Land, for each degree of nested world. For us, it’s thirty-five years. As it should be in normal reality!