“She didn’t feel it. Dropped like a stone. She doesn’t even own a bra,” she said, rummaging in the bag. “I haven’t gone out without a bra since I was twelve years old.”
“You did last night. I saw you in the back at the keynote.” I watched her pull a T-shirt over her head for a band I didn’t recognize. “Why did that other quantologist take your place? The real R1D0?”
She sighed. “If I say we’re exactly the same, I mean we are exactly the same. Literally the only difference in our lives is that the night I actually made the discovery, she went out for an anniversary dinner with Mabel, and I cancelled dinner and stayed in the lab. That’s our divergence point. She’s pissed she didn’t stay in the lab that night. She wants the glory. She’s let that supersede everything else, thinks she’d be happy if only she were in my shoes. That’s all. I mean, I’d be pissed too, but I don’t think she’s seeing clearly. She’s still with Mabel. That matters way more than a name on a paper, even one this huge.”
“Her decision must have been spur of the moment,” I said. “I think she heard the call you made, and switched clothes with the body when she realized she was the first one there. I’m not sure why she took both radios, but maybe that was panic. I heard the second one inside her room when I was standing in the hall with her. Anyway, I saw her speak last night. She could be you perfectly.”
“She is me. Nobody will know the difference. She can have them. Now I don’t have to feel guilty about leaving my family, even; it’s her world that’ll have to deal with her absence. Anyway, she might have been headed up to the club to do exactly the same thing I did.”
I shuddered to think that was true, and how many murderous Sarahs actually existed in that case. “Was that your whole motivation for going into quantology? To switch places?”
“No! We were already in a physics masters program, so finishing that degree and going into quantology wasn’t a stretch. We wanted to know if there really were realities where Seattle still existed. Where Kelly and Taylor and Allison and Scott and Andrea were still alive. Not to go there, just to know.”
I didn’t know who Andrea was, but Kelly and Taylor were my best friends other than Mabel, and we’d all lived in Scott and Allison’s house in Capitol Hill when I first moved to Seattle. I couldn’t imagine the guilt of living in a world where they had all died and I had been spared by some quirk of timing. And Mabel had broken up with her on top of that. She’d lost all of them. Even hearing her say it, it hit my gut as if I’d lost them myself.
“So you weren’t always going to kill someone?” I was still having trouble imagining this ambitious Sarah ditching everything she had to become a DJ, but it didn’t seem as far-fetched anymore. Something else bothered me too. I believed everything else she’d said, but I still couldn’t picture myself bashing in somebody’s head, or taking the time to position her beneath the stage in the hopes of making it look like an accident. Every step screamed intention.
She ran her hands over her short hair, smoothing the flyaways. “I only decided for certain when she came back with her second crate. She must’ve gotten herself messed up in between; she could barely answer my questions when I tried to talk to her. Anyway, I’m sure there are other realities spawned at that moment where I decided not to.”
She believed what she was saying, I could tell, but I didn’t. I was certain she’d waited up there, taken the time to pick the perfect weapon from the show-and-tell table. She might even have picked in advance, when the questionnaires had come in, researching the offerings until she found the award that she could turn into a weapon; that would explain why the Hall of Fame was in the nightclub instead of someplace people could browse it throughout the weekend. It was disorienting, to hear her lying to herself and recognize it for what it was. I wasn’t her, I reminded myself again. We’d made different choices to bring ourselves to this point.
“And in case you’re wondering, I wouldn’t have killed you for your Seattle, either. You haven’t squandered it. Most haven’t. Anyway, when I started my research I thought I would be happy if I just proved that they were out there somewhere, in some other reality. That’s why we all got into quantology, to prove there were other possibilities, not to change places. And that felt like enough until I started researching all of you to figure out who to invite. Until I found her”—she pointed at herself—“and realized there was a way to make it happen. If I didn’t try, I’d always wonder about it. You’d do the same thing, right?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t think so. I hoped not.
She kept talking. “When I reached out to the other quantologists, I picked ones who had diverged before I had that idea. Or so I thought, anyway. Maybe I was wrong about that, at least in the case of R1D0. I didn’t think about the ways they’d diverge because of the influence of my inviting them to help plan this. That was short-sighted. Do you think the others know I switched?”
“I don’t think so.” None of them had mentioned it to me. If they didn’t know, that meant they hadn’t thought of it; if they hadn’t thought of it, that left only one or two capable of murder.
“Yeah, I hope not. I want to think I’m the worst of us, other than her.” She stood before me, wearing the clothes of the DJ I’d met the day before, wearing her life. “So what are you going to do? Are you going to tell them? Turn me in?”
“Did you ever chase down a runaway horse?”
She looked confused, then nodded.
I thought about divergence points. I’d never felt I could have done anything else in that moment on the road, which was a good thing. Even the tiniest choices paralyzed me; I tried to play out every decision’s every repercussion. Better not to have time to think.
Up until I came here, I’d tried to tell myself that once I made a choice it was done, I had to own it. We all built the future with our choices every day, never knowing which ones mattered. Now I still had to own it, but I knew others were stuck living the other side of my decisions, or I was living theirs. I wasn’t even sure yet if that was paralyzing or freeing. If I let her go, if she was anything like me, guilt might wear her down to nothing. That was a punishment in itself. If I turned her in, would it be justice for the DJ, or merely proof I could solve a crime?
“If you turn me in,” she said, as if I had spoken out loud, “there’s going to be a whole lot of confusion in a whole lot of places. I have no idea how any authority will deal with it. There’ll be a dead body in one world, an accused killer in another. If you let me go, think of all the good I can do. I can repair her relationships with our friends and family. I can find her world’s Mabel. This Sarah was never going to pull out of her spin, I swear. She would be dead tomorrow or next week or next month. And she’ll still be dead tomorrow. I could do some good there in her world.”
Somewhere out there, iterations were sparking. Variations on the host, deciding and not deciding to go through with her plan. Killing the DJ, changing her mind and walking away. More iterations yet: the second quantologist, making and unmaking her split-second decision to leave her life and slip into one that was identical in all ways but a crucial one. Somewhere, another me turned in the second but not the first, the first but not the second. Both. Neither.
Some other place, the DJ had never died. She put another record on her turntable, slowed the beat to match the song already playing, shifted seamlessly from one into the other. Some other place, a hotel nightclub full of Sarahs danced awkwardly to their favorite music, shaped by their worlds, shaping new ones.
— Acknowledgments —
I don’t know how many authors walk around from childhood harboring the dream of a short fiction collection, but I need to start by thanking Small Beer Press for making this book a reality. My love for short fiction is an unseemly love, and if I started thanking all of the writers whose work inspired me, it would be a book of its own.
My wife, Zu, deserves her own acknowledgment page. She keeps
my heart steady and whole.
My fiction is always better for someone pushing me to ask the next question. My deepest thanks to everyone who critiqued these and other stories, including Sherry Audette Morrow, Rep Pickard, A. C. Wise, A.T. Greenblatt, Fran Wilde, Siobhan Carroll, Karen Osborne, Richard Butner, Christopher Rowe, Kelly Link, Gavin J. Grant, Kiini Ibura Salaam, Maureen F. McHugh, Karen Joy Fowler, Molly Gloss, Ted Chiang, Meghan McCarron, Carmen Maria Machado, James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel, Andy Duncan, Jessica Reisman, Christopher Brown, Nathan Ballingrud, Matthew Kressel, E. Lily Yu, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Dale Bailey, my mother, my sisters, and everyone at the Baltimore Science Fiction Society critique circle. If I left anyone off that list, my most profound apologies.
Thank you to the original editors of these stories—everyone at Asimov’s, Uncanny, F&SF, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Apex—and to all the magazine and anthology editors there and elsewhere who gave my stories homes, encouraged me, traded Twitter puns, and provided edits that make me look smart. A special shout out to Sheila Williams, whose early and ongoing support and friendship mean the world to me.
Thank you to everyone who invited me to workshops and retreats for providing mental space and actual space and good beer and fantastic company.
Thank you to the Red Canoe for letting me sit in your lovely cafe for uncountable hours.
Thank you to my father for the Red Canoe gift cards that funded my second office, and for making sure that every single “year’s best” anthology and Le Guin collection was on our shelves when I was a kid.
Thank you to SFWA and Codex and the most well-hydrated Slack and my beloved Treehouse and BSFS and AN and EF and all the reading-series-runners and all the Baltimore writers and musicians for community and friendship and support.
Thank you to my writing buddy K. M. Szpara for his advice and company. If you don’t have a friend at a similar career point whose work ethic complements yours, I highly recommend it.
Thank you to all my writing and history teachers, but particularly Judith Tumin, teacher and friend.
Thank you to all my family members who are not otherwise thanked above, for unwavering support, and to all the friends who are as close as family.
Thank you to all my music friends for being patient while I do the splits over this faultline. It’s all storytelling, but the beat varies.
Thank you to my agent, Kim-Mei Kirtland, for expertly helping me to steer this ship.
Thank you to everyone who reads stories.
— Publication History—
“A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide,” The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, 2014
“And We Were Left Darkling,” Lightspeed, 2015
“Remembery Day,” Apex Magazine, 2015
“Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea,” Lightspeed, 2016
“The Low Hum of Her,” Asimov’s Science Fiction, 2014
“Talking with Dead People,” The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 2016
“The Sewell Home for the Temporally Displaced,” Lightspeed, 2014
“In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind,” Strange Horizons, 2013
“No Lonely Seafarer,” Lightspeed, 2014
“Wind Will Rove,” Asimov’s Science Fiction, 2017
“Our Lady of the Open Road,” Asimov’s Science Fiction, 2015
“The Narwhal” appears here for the first time.
“And Then There Were (N-One),” Uncanny Magazine, 2017
— About the Author—
Sarah Pinsker’s stories have won the Nebula and Sturgeon awards, and have been finalists for the Hugo, the Locus, and the Eugie Foster Memorial Award. Her first novel, Song for a New Day, will be published in autumn 2019. She is also a singer/songwriter with three albums on various independent labels and a fourth she swears will be released someday soon. She was born in New York and has lived all over the US and Canada, but currently lives with her wife in Baltimore in a hundred-year-old house surrounded by sentient vines. Her website is sarahpinsker.com.
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———
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Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea Page 30
