The Realities of Aldous U

by Michael Lawrence

  ‘No Mr. and Mrs. Paine.’

  AU stopped leafing. ‘Did you notice a poster on the wall?’

  ‘Yeah. Some man in a suit.’

  The book slammed shut. ‘Reality 78. It’s one of the few in which the British monarchy is appreciably different.’

  ‘Reality 78?’ Alaric said. ‘The realities are numbered?’

  AU returned the ledger to the cupboard. ‘Yes, by me.’

  ‘And there are seventy-eight?’

  ‘Oh, there are more than seventy-eight. Many, many more.’ He resumed his seat at the table. ‘Would you like to hear how the monarchy of R78 turned out so differently?’

  ‘I’d rather hear how many realities there are.’

  ‘In the fifteenth century England of that reality,’ AU began anyway, ‘it was proved conclusively that Edward Plantagenet, eldest son of Richard, Duke of York – next in line to the throne – was the progeny not of the Duke and his lady wife but of the lady wife and a common archer by the name of Blaybourne. This ruled Edward out of the succession, so that when the cuckolded Duke copped it in battle (along with his second son, Edmund) it was his third son, George, who took up the succession, and, after he became king, George’s descendants who ruled henceforward. That bloodline produced a King Rupert for the seventeenth century and two Henrys for the eighteenth. There was no nineteenth century Queen Victoria, but a queen of that name reigned from 1959 to 2001. In all realities but seventy-eight, the man who’s now King there (your man in a suit) is a children’s book editor in New York called Steve.’

  ‘How do you remember all this?’ Alaric asked.

  ‘I remember because I’m fascinated by alternative histories. But I suspect that you’re not.’

  ‘I’ve never been big on history.’

  ‘This is hardly standard history.’

  ‘Still. Why do you number the realities?’

  ‘As a way of telling them apart, why’d you think? There are many versions of The Underwood See, some of which are worth visiting, some well worth keeping out of. I like to keep tabs on them. It’s safer.’

  ‘The Underwood See?’ Alaric said.

  ‘You must have heard of it.’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Bishop Underwood, founder of Withern Rise?’

  ‘Yes, him I’ve heard of.’

  ‘Naughty old lad,’ AU said with relish. ‘Put it about all over the place. But his misdemeanors caught up with him in the end and he was obliged to resign his office and retreat to the modest riverside estate he’d created for himself and his family some years earlier.’

  ‘Withern Rise.’

  ‘Yes. A “see”, as I’m sure you know, is a precisely-defined district under the authority of a bishop or archbishop. His diocese. Just what our favorite Lothario no longer had once he chucked the job. The locals, seeing a chance to rub it in, wasted no time in dubbing his property The Underwood See, it being all that he still retained any jurisdiction over. What none of them knew – maybe it wasn’t even the case back then – is that the garden of Withern Rise contains intermittent crossing points to variations of itself. Rarely the same variations either. I’ve found eleven crossing points over the years. Maybe twelve, I might have lost count.’

  Alaric gaped. ‘There are twelve ways into other realities at Withern Rise?’

  ‘I said over the years. None of them have been permanent.’

  ‘But one of them’s at the willow in the north garden?’

  ‘Yes, currently. Most crossing points break up after a while and never return, but for some reason that one comes and goes, which makes it the most consistent.’

  ‘Are they always around trees, these crossing points?’

  ‘Trees? What gives you that idea? No, they’re in the ground.’

  ‘The ground? But…’

  ‘But?’

  ‘When Naia and I first met we thought we’d been brought together by a pair of ornaments our mothers made from a piece of the old oak. We were wrong then.’

  Aldous U spread his hands beneficently. ‘Not necessarily. If a tree stands in a piece of transiently active ground, the power – for want of a better word – could seep into the roots and from there through the trunk and branches. It’s an attractive notion. I wouldn’t discount it.’

  ‘Naia also had a theory that we’d crossed into one another’s realities because certain factors all came together at the same time,’ Alaric said.

  AU smiled. ‘Dear Naia. I’ll be fascinated to see what that girl does with her life.’

  ‘So what are these crossing points? I mean, how do they... form?’

  AU leaned forward, eyes suddenly bright. ‘Now on that I have a theory of my own. Would you care to hear it?’ Alaric gave a non-committal shrug, which it pleased AU to take for intense interest. ‘Sounds a tad loony-fringe even to me,’ he said, ‘but I believe that the area formerly known as The Underwood See hosts a chance confusion of shifting ley lines – or some sort of equivalent; for convenience’s sake let’s call them ley lines – which move about under the surface, infinitely slowly, sometimes pausing for months, even years. When the lines intersect, as they do every once in a while, they become crossing points to realities where identical intersections have simultaneously occurred. When the lines move on, the crossing point ceases to be. A new one forms soon enough as a rule, but an extended break between the termination of one and the formation of another can leave you stranded for quite a while. I was once stuck here for nineteen months, unable to find a new way out. Lean times, I can tell you. What do you think?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘My shifting ley lines.’

  ‘Like you said, it’s only a theory. Like Naia’s factors.’ AU sat back, disappointed that the first outing of his hypothesis had met with such indifference. ‘If you can go to any reality,’ Alaric said, ‘why live in this one?’

  ‘You mean because it’s so crappy?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘It wasn’t always like this. When I first came here, there was more visible life – not human life, though there clearly had been once. Some fascinating birds and insects, interesting species of mammal, and there were flowers everywhere, glorious flowers, and the skies were blue, the river higher, the water clear. As the one place I could return to and know that my presence wouldn’t influence events, it was hard to beat.’

  ‘But you can visit any reality you want?’

  AU unclipped a black leather wallet from his belt, from which he took a small gray pouch. He placed the pouch between them on the table.

  ‘Whenever I happen upon a reality for the first time I bring something of it back with me, something natural: a handful of leaves, a fragment of bark, a smattering of earth. If I wish to return at a later date I take a pouch like this, which by then contains some of that material, and as long as I’m at a crossing point I’m there in a single step. Material from one reality has no place in another, so when it gets a chance to go home it will, taking the carrier along for the ride.’

  ‘How long did it take you to work that out?’

  ‘Not as long as you might think. This took rather longer.’ AU tapped the wallet. ‘Whenever I want to return from a reality I put its pouch in one of these, go to the crossing point, and back I come. It’s made of leather, you see. Tanned animal-hide acts as a barrier between a reality and any unadulterated material that belongs to it. I was chuffed as buggery when I discovered that.’

  ‘These pouches,’ Alaric said, ‘do they come in different colors?’

  ‘Why, thinking of marketing them? Yes, but the colors mean nothing. I make them out of whatever scraps I happen to have, that’s all.’

  Alaric tugged the green pouch from his pocket. Surprised to see it, AU took it from him.

  ‘Where’d you get this?’

  ‘I thought Naia dropped it. Tried to go after her to give it back, but ended up here. Now I know why. It wasn’t hers.’

  ‘Oh, but it was. On loan. It brought her here. I int
ended to meet her, but she came early. Not a wise move as it turned out, but that explains how you came to be here. Until now I assumed it was by chance.’

  ‘Any idea what brought Naia to my reality?’

  ‘Not yet. Where were you when you met?’

  ‘The willow in the north garden. We sort of crashed into one another.’

  ‘Then it was you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Naias and Alarics are essentially the same person. Even if you had never met a Naia you might be vaguely aware of one now and again, in dreams or perhaps as an unseen presence. But you have met, and a link has been forged which can be reactivated in the right circumstances. The circumstance this time was that you were at the very point she was about to return to in her almost identical reality. Your being there pulled her off course.’

  ‘All right, I get that, but if she went back to her reality from mine...’

  ‘How could she if she didn’t have a pouch containing material from it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Her clothes,’ said Aldous U.

  ‘Her clothes?’

  ‘She was drawn to your reality by your presence in just the right spot, but she would have continued on to hers when you were no longer physically close, courtesy of the natural fibers in her garments. I only wear things made from synthetic fibers when I set out from here. Not being natural, they have no home reality.’

  ‘So how do you get back here?’

  AU displayed the green pouch on his palm. ‘By way of an R43. I never go anywhere without one.’

  ‘Does the number mean anything?’ Alaric asked.

  ‘Year of my birth. 1943. Keeps me grounded.’

  ‘Can you give me some idea how many realities there are?’

  ‘Some idea is the best I can do. I’ve personally visited thousands – ’

  ‘Thousands!’

  ‘ – but that’s just a drop in the ocean. Realities spring up all the time. Click, there’s a new one, blink, another dozen, each one complete to the last dentist, taxi driver, overpaid movie star, suicide bomber, grain of sand.’

  ‘How can you know all this?’ Alaric said. ‘How can you possibly know all this?’

  ‘Much of what I might tell you about the realities is informed by over forty years’ experience among them,’ Aldous U said, ‘but a lot of it’s guesswork, so take what you want from anything I say and jettison the rest. There are more questions than answers in the reality multiverse, and few rules. Just when you think you’ve got it all buttoned down you see something, or something happens, which sends you spinning right back to square one. But this much I do know. The great majority of realities are very short-lived – very short-lived – but that still leaves unquantifiable numbers of all-singing, dancing, fully-populated realities rich in history and calamity, each one of them set to create limitless spin-offs with variable futures at the drop of anyone’s hat. As life generates life, reality fosters reality. We’re all clones of clones of clones, developing in different ways, responding to stimuli of every kind and variety.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like there’s much room for God in all this,’ Alaric said.

  ‘God? Don’t make me laugh.’ He laughed anyway. ‘You might as well believe in reincarnation, fate, destiny, or imagine there’s some meaning to life. There’s no meaning, there’s no divine plan, no glorious heavenly paradise full of dead relatives where we swan about for all eternity doing sweet bugger-all while managing not to be bored out of our skulls listening to harps. We’re born, we live out our pitiful little lives, we’re scattered on the roses, end of story. Care for a Darjeeling?’

  ‘I’d rather know your name.’

  ‘My name? Why?’

  ‘Seems fair. You know who I am.’

  ‘If you insist.’ AU gave his preferred name, in the form he considered appropriate in the present company.

  ‘Naia mentioned you,’ Alaric said. ‘Why the U?’

  ‘It’s the initial of my surname.’

  ‘As in Underwood?’

  AU smiled. ‘As in whatever you like.’

  ‘Why not the whole name? Sound pretentious, just the initial.’

  ‘I know.’ He twinkled. ‘I wrestle with that sometimes.’

  ‘So what are you? Some sort of relative?’

  ‘Of yours? I’m not sure people from different realities can be related. If they were, everyone would be swamped with surplus uncles, aunts, cousins, and what-have-yous. People would have to take three jobs to pay for all the Christmas and birthday presents.’

  ‘Naia said you leave notes for her. Why? What’s in them?’

  ‘They’re my way of… easing her into things. Reality things.’

  ‘Why her? I mean why that Naia if she’s not the only one?’

  ‘Why her? Because – I think – she’s the victim of a devastating quirk of chance, in spite of which she remains inquisitive, intuitive, compassionate. Also, she was born in the same reality as me.’

  ‘You come from the same reality as her?’

  ‘Her original reality, yes. I – ’

  He would have said more had something not thumped the window. Startled, they both craned forward and looked out, but whatever it was had already dropped from sight. There was no question as to where the missile came from, however. The gangling youth standing in the yard with his hands on his hips was so surprised to see two faces looking out instead of the one he’d expected that his eyes popped.

  ‘Now he has to be one of them!’ AU growled, jumping up. His chair clattered to the floor behind him. He stormed to the door, and out.

  Alaric heard little of the ensuing conversation. Conducted across the yard, it started quietly enough, but when the youth unzipped his jeans and urinated on the one beautiful flower there, the turquoise iridian imported a week ago from R216, Aldous U howled with fury and rushed at him. The youth whooped derisively, hopped over the wall, and ran into the forest shouting abuse. AU, preferring the gate, went after him.

  Alaric glanced at his watch. That package for his father. If he wasn’t there to sign for it, Dad would go ballistic – ‘Can’t trust you to do a damn thing, can I? One hour, just one sodding hour out of your busy schedule, that’s all I asked.’ Frustrated, because there was still so much to learn here, he looked for the green pouch that would bring him back whenever he wished. It wasn’t there. The only pouch on the table was the gray one from the leather wallet. It being all there was, he grabbed it. He started for the door, but before he reached it remembered what Aldous U had said about unshielded pouches taking the bearer to the reality its contents belonged to. He returned for the wallet, put the pouch into it, sealed it, and went out.

  Beyond the gate he turned left as advised and, after a little foraging some way along, found the path. It wasn’t easy to follow, being both convoluted and overgrown, but eventually he came to a familiar part of the forest, where a single step returned him to the willow in the north garden.

  His willow, his garden.

  26: 39

  It wasn’t until she was approaching the house after leaving Alaric’s reality that Naia missed the pouch that had taken her to Aldous U’s. Furious with herself for losing it, she stomped around the garden for some fifteen minutes before calming down, and did little with the rest of her day but walk and sit on her own pondering the events of the morning and their relation to a certain other episode that had changed things so dramatically eight months ago. First, the two Alarics. She’d barely glimpsed the one who saved her from that reptile, but from what she had seen he wasn’t much less of a savage himself, in appearance at least. And the second one, in the reality she’d mistaken for her own, he had no memory of meeting her in June, or of young Aldous, or seven-year-old Rayner. What was that all about? What it was about, she decided after sifting through a range of possibilities, was that in February, at the instant she was flung into this reality, all exits barred to her, a new one had splurged into existence to allow Alaric to take her place in her original reality a
nd carry on in his. In that fateful instant one Alaric had become two. But if that had happened – and she couldn’t doubt it, having seen the evidence with her own eyes – could it mean that there was also another Naia at a Withern Rise in which her mother still lived? If so, maybe the Naia she’d seen walking along the hall yesterday was a glimpse of herself in that reality. Her true reality. Taking this supposition even further, it seemed possible that the other Naia had turned the kitchen tap on in that reality just as she herself was about to turn it on in this. Their realities were so close in all but one respect that there’d been a freak seven-second unification of – of all things – their two cold kitchen taps.

  There were other conundrums that she couldn’t begin to solve on her own. The Alaric in the woods for one. More information was needed about him before she could factor him into the equation. It would probably help if she had someone to talk to about these things. A brainstorming session with a receptive, open-minded individual might produce theories and explanations that eluded her in solitude. But there was no one.

  Or was there? Wasn’t there one person who might hear her out and not think she should be sectioned? Someone she was going to Cambridge with tomorrow because they had agreed a week ago that they needed a day away from Eynesford and the house?

  27: 43

  Mid-evening found Ric squatting in the dark of the forest way beyond the flickering light that illuminated the faces of the five sitting around the fire. The talk he overheard was mainly Scarry’s and Gus’s, with the latter’s sharp voice dominant. The young boys were plainly terrified of Gus now, and even Scarry was careful not to push him too far. It was obvious to Ric, listening from the dark, that it was just a matter of time before Scarry was displaced. When that happened the youngsters would become Gus’s whipping boys, thumped and cudgeled for the smallest misdeed or wrong word, or just because he felt like it.

  What they were saying was not of great interest until Gus’s ‘About time we saw to him’ caught his ear, followed by Scarry’s quizzical: ‘How’ja mean?’ Ric saw Gus draw a finger across his throat. After that, all he could hear was the occasional crack of wood, fracturing like snapped bones.