Finity

by John Barnes

  I shrugged. “Well, there’s one implication in the whole thing. If the addresses and domains aren’t correlated with the histories, then what that tells us is that people are distributing across the various pasts without any regard for geography, which kind of implies that the rate of crossing over is uniform around the world. Which lends support to the idea that somehow or other people have begun to drift between the Many Worlds.”

  “People, objects, phone calls, and e-mail at least,” Helen said. “I wonder what else is? And here’s a question for you. Suppose Schrödinger teaches the cat to flip a coin and push a lever based on the outcome, and then he puts the kitty in the box with a setup so that one lever releases poison gas. How come the cat isn’t half alive and half dead from doing that, just as if he used a subatomic experiment? Schrödinger has no way of knowing which way the coin flip came out from the outside. But I’m sure the cat is either alive or dead, no other way about it. What difference does using a subatomic gadget make?”

  “Great question,” I said. “In fact—”

  The phone rang, Helen picked it up, said hello, mouthed “Iphwin” at me. “Yes,” she said. “Of course we’ll be happy to do that, sir, but I was wondering why you think that we—oh, my god. Well, I see. Okay. We’ll get right down to the apartment, pack a bag, and get ready to go. Yes, sir, of course. Thanks and good-bye.”

  She hung up, shaking her head, and said, “Well, brace yourself. We’re on our way to Mexico City. Maybe we can manage to visit Colonel Sykes while we’re in the country, eh?”

  “What’s in Mexico City?”

  “There’s a ConTech employee, a woman from Uppsala in the province of Sweden in the Danish Empire—whatever the hell that may be, but it doesn’t seem to bear much of a resemblance to any arrangement I’d heard of before—whose name is Ulrike Nordstrom. She’s being held by the police in Mexico City, on suspicion of murder. Iphwin seems to think that Nordstrom really did the murder, but that the evidence the Mexico City cops have on hand isn’t enough to hold her, so our job is to go there, with big wads of Iphwin’s money, pay Nordstrom’s bail, bribe some public officials, and get Nordstrom safely back into the keeping of ConTech.”

  “Why us? He must have thousands of employees who can do that job.”

  “He does. But he thinks we’ll help to stir matters up a bit, as he puts it. It so happens that the deceased appears to be Billie Beard.”

  Who knew what I might have thought of this last week? By now I was getting so used to the way the world had started to work that all I did was sigh and say, “Billie Beard has a knack for turning up dead in an extremely inconvenient fashion. I hope that woman knows how much trouble she is.”

  “At least one of her is less aware of it right now than she was a while ago. Come on, we’ve got to pack—Iphwin wants us to get on a jump flight in about two hours.”

  We got off the elevator at our floor in comfortable silence; I know I was mainly thinking that this had to be more interesting than sitting in an office, playing phone pranks and tabulating the results. I suppose Helen was thinking the same.

  We were less than a step from the door to our apartment when Helen froze and stuck her hand out, against my chest. I was about to say “What?” loudly, but I had heard it too— something in the apartment had gone thump, loudly, and as I listened there was a softer thud, and the not-quite-consciously-perceptible sense that something was moving near the door.

  Helen pointed to the wall by the hinges of the door, and I flattened myself against it. Then she pressed her back against the wall on the doorknob side of the door, took out her key, and put that in her left hand. She nodded at me, meaningfully, and I wondered what she meant for just an instant before I saw her pull a pistol from her purse and soundlessly set the purse down on the floor beside her.

  She unlocked the door and shoved it open, burst into the room taking up a firing stance—and let out the happiest little cry I had ever heard from her. “Fluffy!”

  There on the rug, rolling around, clearly overjoyed to see her, was her ratty old Persian cat from years ago, the one that I remembered as dying of old age two years ago, and Helen had told me she remembered as having gotten run over. Fluffy looked pretty old—the fur was thin, fine, and dry, she was now terribly scrawny, and pretty clearly she was a little stiff in the hips—but otherwise about the same cat that I remembered. “You know how to use a gun again,” I said, because it was the first thing I thought of.

  “And you’re not in a wheelchair,” she said, scooping up the cat and hugging it to her chest. “And Fluffy is obviously a whole lot better too.” I stood and stared at her as she set the gun down on the counter to have both hands free to play with the cat. After a long moment she looked back at me and said, “Oh, don’t look so surprised. I’m sure I didn’t understand half of it, but just ten minutes ago, at our meeting with Iphwin, you explained everything that’s been happening since last Friday, and it made perfect sense to me.”

  * * * *

  The whole way to Mexico City, including almost an hour of weightlessness, we talked, with me trying to piece together enough information from Helen’s memory to be able to figure out what I had explained to her before. This Helen was perhaps ten pounds heavier than the one I was used to, much more solidly built and muscular, and had led rather a more adventurous life; she seemed fond enough of me, but she didn’t have the complex, thoughtful approach to the world that, the Helen I was used to did, and I had a distinct sense that whatever it was that my other self, over in some other stream of time, had figured out, this one had not listened as carefully or asked as many questions as the Helen I had had lunch with. Therefore, she just didn’t provide enough information for me to reconstruct whatever the solution that some other I had arrived at had been.

  The ConTech company ship made a swift, safe landing on the lake; since the beginning of jump boat travel, cities had gone to great lengths to open up bodies of water near themselves for landing areas, and Mexico City was now about half lake, at least as much as it had been during early Aztec times. We hit the water, motored up to a company slip, and were waved right through all the usual formalities; it was dark out on the lake, at five A.M. We had flown right through most of the night, into the previous day, in a bare couple of hours—it had been Tuesday, five-thirty P.M. when we left, and now it was Monday, five A.M. We knew that we’d be exhausted soon enough, but for the moment the effect was of being oddly wide awake for the time of day it was.

  As we approached the company slip, we saw there was a sizable group of men waiting for us. The moment the boat tied up and the gangplank extended, as we walked off the boat, a slim man approached me. In the lights of the pier, I could see that he had black, tightly curled hair and an aquiline nose; he wore a small goatee, a plain white shirt, and dark trousers and coat.

  “Are you Mr. Lyle Peripart?” he asked, in accentless English.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “And you are Miss Helen Perdita?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  With a very slight shrug and nod he commanded the big men who lunged forward to handcuff us. “Then I am afraid that I shall have to place both of you under arrest. We understand that you are coming here in the matter of a murder, and we rather suspect that your presence here was ordered by Geoffrey Iphwin or by ConTech, both of which have been indicted in absentia for conspiracy to commit murder. You may enter a guilty plea now if you wish, or wait until a later meeting with a police interrogator.”

  They relieved Helen of a frightening array of weapons, more or less politely, and then pushed us into a police van, not too roughly, and drove us to the station. It turned out that the slim man who had arrested us was going to be our interrogator, a detail he had somehow failed to mention before, and that interrogation would begin immediately.

  “My name,” he said, standing over me, after Helen had been taken out, and I had been cuffed to a small stool, bolted to the floor in the center of the room, “is Jesús Picardin.”

&
nbsp; “Thank you very much for faxing the file of documents that got us released,” I said.

  He stared at me incredulously. “What in the sweet name of Our Savior are you talking about?”

  I told him the story of our rescue from the jail in Saigon, and he said, “This is the most preposterous set of alibis that I’ve ever heard. First of all, my chief investigator, Senora Beard, would have had no reason to be anywhere in the People’s Republic of Vietnam, and in any case that city is called Ho Chi Minh City, so far as I know. And if Helen Perdita had indeed shot her there, I would hardly have been working to free Helen Perdita. As for your mention of Esmé Sanderson, this is the most preposterous part of the whole story—who do you think you are trying to fool? She’s shared an office with Billie Beard for the better part of ten years, and the two are old partners; now that Billie is gone, in fact, Esmé is going to be my acting second in command. How you could expect her to give you an alibi is beyond me.”

  One of the men came in and said something to Picardin; “teléfono” was the only word I caught, but the rest of it apparently told the police captain that it was important, because he got up and went out to get it. While he was out there, I contemplated my situation. A week ago I had only been dimly aware that this city existed, and although I suppose I knew it must have police stations, it would not have occurred to me that I would be sitting in one. Worse yet, from my standpoint, I was clearly a really long way from home myself, now, because I was in one of the worlds where Saigon was called Ho Chi Minh City, which meant I was somewhere outside my home group of worlds by some considerable distance; there were no Reichs here. That seemed like a good enough thing, but from the cursory perusal of the notes Helen and I had been able to do, if you got away from National Socialism, you found yourself in the world of the Puritan Party, or the ones where Communist Russia had conquered the Earth, or the ones where America had gone up in a nuclear civil war of some kind in the early 1980s. There were some other families of worlds, as well, we thought, but we hadn’t gotten them sorted out yet.

  At the moment, if the name Ho Chi Minh City was the clue that I thought it was, we were probably in one of the Communist-descended lines, which wasn’t where either Helen or I had come from. Clearly ConTech existed in this world, and so did Geoffrey Iphwin, but would the Geoffrey Iphwin of this world even recognize our names? If he did, would we be his employees, and would he be sending any help?

  I tried to leave that question thoroughly alone, but unfortunately it was about the only source of amusement I had, except perhaps for meditating upon the way my wrists hurt where they were cuffed to the chair. The room itself offered only whitewashed concrete block walls, a spotless black floor with a drain that made me wonder if perhaps in this particular version of Mexico the police might be even a little bit inclined to brutality, and two fluorescent fixtures with thin metal dividers just below the glowing tubes. The only decor was the door, painted pale hospital green, with a big dead-bolt lock on the other side; the bolt itself was visible in the gap between the door and the jamb, but it looked like you’d need a welding torch to get through it, the door seemed convincingly hard to break, and anyway I wasn’t going to get anywhere near it unless I got out of the handcuffs, which I had no idea of how to do.

  Perhaps I would be better off considering just how far away from any kind of home or help we might be, after all. Or just thinking about how much my wrists hurt.

  The door opened, and Jesús Picardin came in, with Helen walking after him. She had all her weapons in a wire basket, exactly like the one in which Picardin had my wallet, belt, computer, and belt phone. “We’ll have to move quickly,” Picardin said, his voice low and hushed.

  Helen, behind him, had a tense but friendly little smile, and she nodded at me, indicating that I was supposed to cooperate in this, whatever “this” might be. Picardin undid the handcuffs and handed me my things; I put the belt on, the wallet in my pocket, and made sure everything was good to go. “I’m not sure how long Geoffrey Iphwin will be able to keep Esmé on the phone. She was shouting at him, you know. I’m afraid that for some reason or other she blames him for the death of Billie Beard, and this Esmé does not have the memories of Billie that I do—or that the Esmé I know does. But if we can get past the front office, we can probably go get the prisoner released.”

  “If I thank you for our release in Saigon—” I began.

  “Your charming partner has already done so. She said this was the second time I had gotten you released. I never did know what became of that pile of documents I faxed, but I’m very glad that it did you good. Let’s hurry. Quietly now.” He hustled us down a long corridor past two rooms full of busy cops talking to the usual array of battered, hopeless, angry, bewildered, and exhausted people that you see in a police station.

  Once we were clear of those areas, we moved at a dead run, through hallway after hallway, following Picardin. He managed to tell us in a low voice that we were going the long way round in hopes of not being seen before we reached the prisoner’s cell.

  We knew what Ulrike Nordstrom looked like from the photo Iphwin had sent to us, and besides she was the only one in her row of cells; it looked like they didn’t arrest many women as dangerous offenders around here. She was short and pale blonde, a little heavy, and she wore her hair in a sort of bowling-ball cut. She immediately jumped up and said, “Lyle! Helen! Am I glad to see you! What are you doing here?”

  Helen and I glanced at each other, and I said, “Er, we know you from your photograph, but how do you know us?”

  “It’s me. It’s Ulrike! Lyle, you and I were married for five years, and Helen was my maid of honor. Right after college. It can’t have been that long.”

  Picardin was looking at us very, very intently, and didn’t seem to be the least bit pleased, but he unlocked the cell door and let her out anyway. “I have a key for a back service exit,” he said, “so we can get you out of here. But I wish someone would tell me things before they become surprises.”

  “We all wish that very much,” Helen said.

  Picardin handed her papers and wallet back to Ulrike. She seemed to be pouting, and from the way she was watching me, I got the distinct impression that at one time this expression had been some kind of private signal between Ulrike and whatever Lyle it was that she had married. She was getting angry at me, I guessed, because I wasn’t receiving the signal. We hurried after Picardin, down the hall, and out the door he motioned us through. “We’ll be in touch, I’m sure,” he said. “I just hope I can figure out the rules of this world before I make any mistakes that are too big.”

  At the end of the long dark alley, we found a street that seemed to be deserted, and, knowing nothing more than that the lake, where ConTech’s jump boat was, was west, that was the way we headed. We hurried on for a few blocks without seeing anything move—the sun would be coming up in a few minutes, and apparently this neighborhood was too affluent to have people who worked early mornings, but not affluent enough to have servants coming in at this hour.

  After a few blocks without seeing anyone, we relaxed, and Ulrike said, “Lyle, I don’t know where to begin. Your family sponsored me to come to New Zealand, after the war, and I came and lived at your house, and when I first got there I was thirteen, you were eleven, and your brother Neil was fifteen. Doesn’t any of this ring any bells?”

  “Oh, it rings all sorts of bells,” I said. “Just not the ones you might think.” The white buildings around us seemed like tombs, or a movie set, no lights on in them—not just ordinary city and household darkness, but no lights, not even one left on accidentally, or a child’s night-light, or a light for finding the bathroom. This was getting stranger and stranger. The street, too, was strangely dusty and encrusted with old dust-drifts on top of the cracked and broken pavement; didn’t anyone ever sweep the streets around here? “In the last few days I’ve learned that memories are one of the least trustworthy things you can find. Trust me on what I remember. Four years before I was bo
rn, my parents were in a car wreck, with my newborn brother, Neil. They lived, but he was killed. I never knew him.”

  “That can’t be!” Ulrike exclaimed. Helen put a heavy hand on Ulrike’s shoulder and a gentle finger across her lips, murmuring something about not being away from police yet. “I remember Neil perfectly,” Ulrike protested. “Great big guy, wonderful sense of humor, star athlete—I might have gotten somewhere with him if he hadn’t been gay. You don’t remember he was lost on the Elizabeth III when that was sunk?”

  I had served on the Lizzy-three, myself, and when I had left Auckland harbor on Friday, she’d been floating at the dock, same as always.

  Ulrike appeared more and more confused, and finally said, “Helen, at least tell me this isn’t some kind of elaborate prank.”