“Thanks a packet,” Malachi said to him as they reached the plane. The Brazilian gave a wolfish grin as they climbed inside.
The jet took them up into a blue sky, reducing the jungle to a carpet of broccoli with burnt-out patches. The weather turned cloudy. The craft climbed above the overcast and whispered north.
“I wonder what Titus said when he sent the word down,” Lena said in the window seat next to Juan.
Malachi grimaced. “What worries me is how the message got down to these thugs after it reached the official recipients.”
“If it got down,” Lena replied. “They might have simply let us go, fearing trouble.”
* * *
Juan sipped his drink and gazed out at the calm ocean off Miami Beach, feeling as if he had returned from the dead, It was quiet here on the twentieth floor of the hotel. The immediate past seemed unreal, the present suspended. He tried not to think about Titus and what the web's discovery would do to the world. The director had not met them at the airport, which indicated a measure of trust.
Closing his eyes, he breathed in the salty air and took a long pull of the bourbon and water. The wet glass reminded him of chilled strawberries. He heard a footfall and opened his eyes. Lena sat down in the chair next to him and smiled as she adjusted her white robe.
“Where's Mal?” he asked.
“Showering.” She looked out to sea. “Do you feel strange? As if we're not really back. Time is slow, memory false.”
She gazed at him and he wondered if now there would be time to say things, to explore each other, to have feelings without the threat of danger.
“Juan,” she started to say, looking worried. Her eyes opened wide, and he saw that she wanted to tell him something, but held back.
He drained his glass and put it down by his chair, wondering how he felt about her.
She smiled when he looked at her again. “Too many drinks,” he said, feeling suddenly that he could not doubt her, that being without her friendship, at the very least, was unimaginable.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I never had time to allow my feelings to grow. Physics requires such a huge initial investment of time, simply to reach competence, much less shine.”
They were silent. “What will they let us do?” she asked.
“They'll have to keep the three of us together,” he said, looking at his watch. “Titus will be here any moment.”
“What do you think will happen?”
He picked up his glass and looked at the melting ice, then drank some of the water. “A green comet will sweep by.” He rattled the cubes. “Its verdant gas will cover our planet, making us all good and full of foresight. We might even grow an extra eye in our heads.” He laughed and put down the glass. “We're capable of everything and we accomplish nothing—nothing that goes very deep at any rate. You grow a human being until he's full of knowledge and insight, until he feels deeply and knows what's right, and then he dies. . .”
“It's like breaking fine musical instruments as soon as they're seasoned,” she said. “But you can't blame humanity for being subject to death, Juan. We haven't had time to beat it yet.”
He turned his head suddenly. “That's the doorbell. He'll have a key. Come in, Titus, we're on the balcony!”
The door opened and closed. Juan stared at a ship on the horizon. “We're out here!” he repeated.
“Dr. Obrion?” a voice asked. “We've never met. Titus Summet sent me here to debrief your team. My name is Magnus Rassmussen.”
The glass slipped from Juan's hand and shattered on the hard floor. “What the hell?”
“Summet will definitely be here tomorrow.” There was no mistaking the voice. Juan looked at Lena, got up, and staggered into the suite.
The tall man confronted him with Magnus's contemplative gaze. His gray hair was more closely cropped. He wore a khaki suit with an open white shirt, and held a briefcase in his right hand.
“How did you get here?” Juan asked, shaken.
Lena came in. Malachi burst out of the bathroom in his towel. The man stared at them, puzzled. “I flew in from New York. What's wrong?”
Magnus lived—but the relief and joy welling up inside Juan was out of place; how could the man be alive?
Lena hurried up to the tall man. “It is you!”
“You have a twin,” Malachi said.
“What do you mean?” the man asked.
Lena regained her composure and stepped back. “You have no idea what a shock this is to us.”
The visitor sat down in a chair with the briefcase in his lap, and looked up at each of them in turn. “I was to have gone with you to the Antarctic, but I know the three of you only by reputation.”
“What have you been told?” Juan asked.
“Why, everything that happened in the Antarctic. You're to tell me what happened after the alien ship carried you away.”
Juan glanced at Malachi, then at Lena. “Magnus, we can't account for your presence here.”
The man winced at the sound of his first name. “What do you mean? We've never met, and I don't have a twin brother.”
Juan said, “Who are you? The three of us saw you die.”
The man's grimace shook Juan's confidence. A bit thinner, less hair and a few more wrinkles, but this was Magnus Rassmussen.
“It's true,” Lena said. “You went with us.”
Rassmussen frowned at her.
“We buried you,” Malachi said, “insane as it sounds.”
Juan gazed intently at the man he had come to admire. Rassmussen looked puzzled and said, “I cannot imagine why you would say these things to me.” He fumbled nervously with his briefcase, and took out a small recorder. “But start from the beginning, and tell a dead man everything you can recall.”
* * *
It was evening when Juan finished. With the recorder still on, Magnus said, “So the frames not only bridge space, but allow passage across probability. The three of you have returned to a world where I didn't go with you. And if symmetry is conserved, your twins from here are just as puzzled somewhere else.”
“Schrödinger's Door,” Malachi said from the sofa.
“Exactly,” Magnus answered, sitting back in his chair.
Juan got up and paced the room again. “It also worries us,” he said, “that if we've been duplicated—that is, if the frames are not direct bridges—then we've not only crossed lines of probability, but we're not our original selves.”
Lena bit her lower lip and reached down to pour herself another cup of coffee from the tray on the floor. “We may have died in one of these universes,” she said shakily as she sat back in her chair.
Magnus nodded. “And there's one in which only two of you survived, or one—an infinite series of branchings, constantly splitting, diverging at every point throughout the cosmos.”
“Can this explain what happened to the builders?” she asked.
“We must assume,” Magnus said, “that they knew enough physics to understand what their frames could do. They might have planned to use the web in this way, accepting a social system based on variant individuals. But we can only speculate.”
“What about asymmetrical effects?” Juan asked.
Magnus raised his eyebrows. “You think the builders might have disappeared from our universe—I mean your universe. They may be present in this one, for all we know.”
“Could they have all disappeared in such a way?” Lena asked.
“With endless alternates available, even asymmetry may occur.”
“We didn't see enough of the web,” Malachi said, “to know if it's deserted, or, for that matter, if there is a web beyond the maps we saw.”
Magnus nodded. “The builders may not be here either—if probable worlds run in a spectrum of fine shadings, with minor differences packed closely together. You'd have to travel far off your reference axis to run into a major difference. It would be interesting to do so.”
Juan stopped pacing an
d said, “The builders ran into the splitter effect, although we can't be certain of that. But they decided to use the web anyway. Still, I don't see how a probability might be drained of their presence. Maybe they decided to abandon the web, which they at first built to connect suns, ships, and planets, but as they developed they decided to leave natural worlds for new life, realizing that taking all that power might prevent fresh intelligences from arising. Maybe they realized that new minds are the most precious thing in nature—so they moved beyond the use of natural worlds and now live in mobile habitats, obtaining their needed resources from sun systems not likely to produce new life.”
“All this may be true,” Magnus replied. “Some starcrossers may still exist in our spaces, in distant sectors of their web, and in mobile worlds. Others may have left our space-time. But I'm not sure we can credit them with compassion for other life on the basis of what you've seen.” He paused for a moment, as if listening to an inner voice. “Curious. As you spoke, Juan, I felt as if I were remembering being out there with you.”
“Perhaps there's some leakage between variants,” Lena said. “What if all probabilities are one and the same at a basic level, except when separated by technical means?”
“Disturbing,” Magnus replied.
Lena got up, went over to the door, and turned on the overhead light, dimming it to a comfortable glow. Juan sat down in a chair. “Magnus, may I ask you a personal question?”
The older man looked at him as if he knew what it would be. “Go ahead.”
“Are you under Summet's thumb?”
“What do you mean?” Magnus asked softly.
“We have to know what kind of man Summet is here,” Juan said.
Magnus nodded. “Yes, I suppose I am. He sent me because he could trust me, and because I would have gone with you. Look, he's given me all the chances I deserve at my age, so you might say I'm his man. He's never asked me to be dishonest. Is that what you wanted to know?”
“What's happening at the Directorate?” Juan asked.
Magnus took a deep breath. “Titus may be replaced if he's seen to be making too many mistakes, even if they aren't mistakes. In your world he may have already been replaced. Your return may help him stay in office.” Magnus smiled wanly. “You must admit, it's a first-rate secret you've brought back, and the fact of your return will confirm his judgment in sending you.”
“Who knows we're back?” Juan asked.
“I'm the only one he called, but he's worried about the mercenaries. I'm sure you didn't intentionally tell them anything, but did you discuss things among yourselves when you were alone? Your conversations might have been overheard or recorded. Granted, little of what you said will be understood, but it might make sense to others later.”
“We're worried,” Juan said, “about how Titus will use all this. Will he enhance UN-ERS power or ally himself with national groups, if they don't already control him?”
“He needs everyone,” Magnus answered. “Remember, the UN-ERS bureaucracy is one thing, but the national bureaucracies of the United States, Russia, China, Japan, South America, and the European States sit within it, and Titus has to play them off against each other for some kind of balance. Environmental problems tend to moderate these rivalries, but the totalitarians are still with us, dedicated to the control of wealth through rapid, shortsighted means. You'll have to work with Titus to have any leverage. He knows only about a ship, and nothing about the web or this probability effect. Lack of knowledge could make this all very dangerous. Even vague suspicions about hidden facts could turn things nasty.”
“He's right,” Malachi said. “If we disappeared, they'd still discover everything for themselves, so it's up to us to help determine how the world will use all this, as much as we can.”
“And save Titus's ass in the bargain,” Juan added.
“Don't let it become a matter of personalities,” Magnus said. “Someone worse may replace Titus.”
“Juan, he's right,” Lena said.
“It's only just,” Magnus continued, “that you all benefit from and help guide what happens to this discovery. The politics will be bad enough without your stepping aside.”
“You're right,” Juan said. He relaxed a little, then wondered if his father was alive in this world. It would be that way, he realized, discovering differences of detail.
Magnus stood up and walked over to the bar cart. Slowly, he dropped a cube of ice in a glass and poured some bourbon. He sipped and turned around, “I know you feel that you've lost your world. Worse, you doubt your identities. But, if you will forgive a more impersonal attitude, there's still a lot left—everything essential, in fact.”
Relativity and quantum mechanics, Juan realized, might have profound psychological implications. Was there some observer effect that had drawn them into this world, where Magnus lived, and not another? Juan felt the darkness within himself. How many of him had stepped across the night sky? Perhaps the infinity of variants merged together to produce peak moments, a richness of reality, a texture of psychological contingency which could never be exhausted. Were dreams and multiple personalities the overlap between variants? Was the mystery he sometimes saw in the eyes of another a sign of possibility splitting at each firing of a synapse in the brain? Life seemed thin at times, with people moving in discrete orbits, circling some vast emptiness, yearning to touch, to quantum leap into a more intense state, there to combine into greater wholes. The fearful masters of humankind's world—this variant included—had set themselves to choke possibility, chain creativity to politics and economic interests, hold back the waves that yearned to break on kinder shores. New doors were opening, but others were closing behind him. Could he believe that the four people in this room could dispense the blessings of the web to humankind? They at least understood and cared, he told himself; but to succeed demanded more than moral ideals—it demanded their violation in the name of greater ideals. Perhaps Titus was necessary after all.
“What now?” Lena asked Magnus, and Juan felt that a million years had passed. He hungered for the simple absence of disappointment, for naive hope; perhaps the cauldron of probability might give it to him.
Magnus looked down into his drink and said, “I won't keep you here, and I won't insist on what you should tell Titus. You can do what you wish with the disk in that recorder.”
Lena went up to him and said, “You are still one of us.”
He smiled. “How could I be otherwise, now that you've told me about myself? By the way, I would be very interested in reading my namesake's notebook.”
“What prevented you from going with us?” Juan asked, suddenly fearing for him again.
“Oh, a bit of illness.” He wandered onto the open balcony. “So I'm buried out there, under an alien tree.” He gazed dispassionately up at the bright, starry sky, then took a long sip from his drink and said, “How poetic a way to end.”
II. WORLDS FOR THE WIND
And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes
—Walt Whitman
18. ACROSS AN AUTUMN
Juan took his time walking across town from the train station. He had checked his bag there because he was uncertain about staying, even though his parents had welcomed him on the phone. Suddenly it seemed that he was walking home across the same autumn he had known on his first day of high school. The oak, maple, and walnut trees that had been planted in this mountain valley by the town's builders were an island of yellows and reds in a sea of pines, firs, and giant redwoods. Hope and caring surged through him as he breathed in the unseasonable warmth. There was still time to defeat the old darkness within the human heart, and the future might yet belong to learning and loving. . .
A knot tightened in his stomach as he turned the corner and stopped a block away from his boyhood home, realizing abruptly that everyday reality was a kind of congealed chaos. Human perceivers drifted on quicksands, extracting only a statistical order from cosmi
c extremes. He stared at the two-story wooden structure with suspicion, as if it might suddenly dissolve back into the quantum sea of mysteries that washed around the human shore.
But as he gazed at the street, the small town took on an awesome permanence. This was the only world that could be, holding its shape stubbornly, as if all the diverging waves of probability had collapsed into one. The bright yellow-red leaves falling from the trees were a changeless change. The street had been repaved, but that made no difference. The single-family houses were in good repair. The wood and brick structures seemed to belong with the more modern ones of flexible ceramic and glass. Everywhere, human will restrained change with continuity.
He reminded himself that the father he would meet here had known his son's college years and early adulthood as a scientist, all the years Juan had lived without a father. The other man had died mocking his son's future profession. Would this stranger also mock? His mother had looked and sounded pretty much the same over the phone. These people were expecting a visit from their son, nothing more; it would be impossible for him to explain.
Angela's house was still there across the street. Painfully, he remembered their senior year breakup. Bert's house stood next to it, somewhat changed by additions. Juan had not seen his friend since graduation. What were friends supposed to be? He sometimes imagined friendships as unique, cosmic events, never to be taken lightly; but they too often became trivial, repetitive betrayals of everything that was great-souled in human beings.
He felt confused as he went down the block. What right did he have to this world? It was not the place from which he had started; and yet it was his, overlaid with an infinity of autumns, in which he was a stranger come home. What mattered a misplaced knothole in the redwoods surrounding the town? The roots and the mountains were the same, despite the flow of probabilities in the minds of observers. This was still his Earth because it embodied the choices of his world; one way or another, the footprints of the human history he knew were all over it.
He came to the open gate and stopped, remembering how often he had been blamed for leaving it open. He closed it behind him, feeling virtuous, and walked up to the old screen door. Here it is, he cried out inwardly as he rang the bell. In the next few impossible moments he would confront a variant of his mother and a living father. Listening to the old man on the phone and staring into his squinting eyes had been unnerving—as if he were reproaching his son for disturbing the dead. Juan was suddenly unable to believe that they would meet. The door would open and he would be in his own world again. I'm dreaming, he told himself. He was only a quantum echo of himself here. The real Juan Obrion had returned to the primary world, the variant where his father was dead. At any moment the echo wave would collapse and he would rejoin himself.
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