Finity

by John Barnes

  “But good luck explaining why you wouldn’t talk on a phone or use a self-driving vehicle, eh?” Kelly said. “I guess I’d have to hope there was an American Theater in Ciudad de Mexico, or maybe start one. I don’t have too many good alternatives, since all I’ve got is travelers’ Spanish. Can you tell me what happens if I do go along?”

  “If I knew what would happen, no one would have to go, and I’d never have disturbed any of you,” Iphwin pointed out. “And I do have considerable resources, so if you truly don’t want to go on the expedition, I can find you a job in my organization, probably in some office where you won’t have to expose yourself to accidental transfer. If that is what you would genuinely prefer.”

  “Aren’t you worried that we’ll all take that offer?” Helen asked.

  “I am, now that you mention it. But it seems like the decent thing to do, given the things you have pointed out about my having so disrupted your lives. And I already have some volunteers, anyway. As you point out, I’m really not good at working with people. This is the best I can do while improvising.”

  As I listened to all the arguments, I had been thinking about my own position. This Helen didn’t much resemble the quiet historian that I liked; and if I couldn’t find the exact one I thought I knew... well, really a composite, since I must have interacted with thousands of very slightly different Helens, each of whom knew thousands of versions of me ... all the same, I could find a more comfortable connection than this one. The odds even seemed reasonably good if I just started making a lot of phone calls.

  On the other hand, what had happened to the United States of America, and how had I—who had been raised as an expat patriot, proud of my heritage—never even noticed that the country itself was gone? Clearly the net extending across all of the worlds had a great deal of editing ability, and both it and the human cultures that depended on it for communication had evolved an immense and sophisticated system for suppressing excessive questions about the inconsistencies that were generated, so it was possible for whole families and complexes of facts to disappear or at least become unspoken.

  But a whole nation?

  I had to admit, it was an interesting problem. And if I started working that phone, I might or might not ever know the answer. Besides, I could just as easily work the phone trick, to find a more compatible Helen, after the expedition—assuming I survived—as before it.

  For that matter, if there was going to be shooting, this Helen had advantages.

  The room had gotten very quiet as everyone who hadn’t committed to the expedition tried to figure out what was best for them. With an effort I drew a breath and said, “Well, then, I guess I’ll go. No reasons I care to talk about.”

  Helen seemed very startled, and then said, “What the hell. Me too.”

  “And me,” Ulrike said. “It makes more sense than trying to do anything else; at least this might lead to something, and everything else just leads to being stranded or picking up a phone and trying for a new world at random.”

  Kelly and Terri looked around the room as if we had all betrayed them, which I guess in a sense we had. With a sigh, Terri said, “You all are the only people I know in this world, you know? If you all go, I kind of have to go. ‘Cause I’d rather not lose the only people I have, and I don’t have any real strong reason to not go, except maybe that I’m kind of afraid—which is a bad reason for not doing anything, I think. Am I making sense? Anyway, I guess, me too, but I’m not happy.” She looked down into her lap where her hands curled and twisted against each other.

  Kelly seemed to be almost in tears, and I don’t suppose I could blame her. “I feel so forced into this.”

  Helen grunted. “You should. That’s what’s happening, you know, no matter how rational it is to do what you’re doing. It’s perfectly rational to give a man with a gun your wallet, and it’s your decision to give it to him, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t forced. You might decide to have your leg amputated if it was badly enough injured and infected, but that doesn’t make it a free choice.”

  Kelly swallowed hard and brushed tears away from her blue eyes, smearing her mascara and making her look messy. “Well, it’s a pretty bad deal, but I do think you’re right—it’s the only one I’ve got going. I guess what I’d better do is come along. Am I required to have a positive attitude?”

  “Not at all,” Iphwin said. “I don’t.”

  * * * *

  The vehicle that the ten of us moved into the next day was an ugly old museum-piece of military hardware, but with Iphwin’s resources applied to getting it, it also happened to be the perfect thing for the job.

  It was a hideous old American Army Model 2018 Squad Transporter, which Roger, Esmé, and Paula all groaned at the sight of. They informed us that it was most commonly known as an “esty” and that “although officially it was a device whose whole purpose was to carry up to a dozen people into harm’s way in a way that protected them and allowed them to do some harming back, its actual role was to maximize human discomfort as part of a sadistic and pointless research experiment,” as Roger Sykes put it.

  This particular esty had apparently been used as a bus by someone with an odd idea of what colors went together, so it had had to be repainted, but the lines and cracks of previous paint jobs showed through the new charcoal-gray paint everywhere. Windows were small and thick with a self-closing gunport beneath each one; the windshield was in two layers spaced about a handwidth apart. Heavy flat rectangular boxes of metal, filled with something to stop projectiles, were placed all over it in a not-too-symmetric way, hanging all around the engine compartment, off the doors and side panels, and so forth. The roof had an unlikely number of roll bars, some of the metal boxes, and just enough thickness to make me pretty sure it was armored all over. The one real weak spot was the rear window, which had clearly been replaced, long ago, with ordinary glass. Roger and Paula fretted about it a little, and rather upset the rest of us with the concern, but since we had no way, in any timely manner, to replace the rear window with any real armored glass, the upset was all they accomplished.

  Naturally it was hand-steered and without any sort of net-based navigation.

  “Must have spent a few years in the American Army,” Paula commented as she ran a series of checkouts and I looked over her shoulder, “and then come to Mexico to be modified for use in one of the many dustups down here, and then gone civilian, oh, I don’t know, twenty years ago, probably in the early ‘40s. After all these years, it’s finally going home—even if it has to go armed.”

  Paula was driving and since I was the current apprentice driver, I sat next to her. The Colonel sat in the middle seat to the right, behind me, so that he could see as much as possible from a protected position, since he was our de facto commander in the event of trouble, and also so he could cover one gunport. Esmé sat on the other side. Jesús and Helen were at the rear corners, able to use either side or rear gunports, and the front was covered by the remote-sighted machine gun on the roof, which either Paula or I could operate from controls on the dash, sighting through a small video screen between us. We weren’t a tank, but we were likely to be more heavily armed than any casual opponents, and that was the real idea—we didn’t want any trouble from the bandits who had come to infest the north in recent decades, so we were trying to be too tough a nut for them to crack. If there were an “other side” out there, we knew nothing of its resources but would have to guess that they were far, far more than this little armed bus could possibly handle.

  There were four people, besides me, who weren’t arms-proficient—Terri, Kelly, Ulrike, and Iphwin—and they were allowed to float more or less freely with the understanding that in the event of any trouble, they would get down on the floor in the middle and stay there.

  “What kind of range does this thing have on a tank of fuel?” I asked Paula.

  “It has Telkes batteries,” she said. “It’s all electric.” Seeing my blank look, she added, “Telkes batteries are
nuclear batteries, and they are supposed to be good for a million miles, and there’s only 350,000 in the mileage record on the central computer. Which doesn’t appear to have been tampered with, unlike the odometer.”

  We were pulling slowly out of our spot in the parking lot of the expensive hotel in Mexico City, and Paula turned around to holler, “Anyone who is about to suddenly remember something that belongs in the baggage locker is welcome to do it now.”

  “Everything’s down there,” Terri said. “Nobody’s got anything bigger than a purse up here.”

  “Just making sure,” Paula said. “In the event of an accident I want to be hit by a nice warm soft human body, not by a suitcase. All right, pulling out, heading north, and if you can sleep where you are, do it, because today is a good day for resting up; we don’t really hit bandit country till tomorrow afternoon.”

  The first day’s drive was as uneventful as she said; we cruised along a potholed but perfectly adequate road, and I got to drive more than half of it. Getting used to pointing the wheels with the steering wheel was easier than it seemed, and the load-balancer that fed power to the electric motors on the wheels worked pretty smoothly so that the response of the esty to the steering wheel was consistent. The thing I had thought was the accelerator was more properly speaking a speed pedal, the device that set the velocistat—i.e. it was the device you used to tell the car how fast you wanted it to go, rather than to make it go faster or slower. Push the pedal twice as far down and the vehicle adjusted its speed to go twice as fast regardless of what slope you might be on. The biggest problem, and the object of plenty of backseat-driver humor, was the brakes.

  “The main brakes are recovery brakes,” Paula explained. “Basically when you apply the brake, a rotor on the wheel generates an electric current that sets up a field that opposes its own motion. It uses the car’s own energy against its motion—the faster you’re going, the harder the brake works, and if the tire locks, the brake lets go right away. Skidproof and stops you in the minimum possible distance—or rather it stops the esty. If you’re not wearing your seat belt, it might not stop you—or rather it will, but it will use the windshield instead of the belt.”

  “Very comforting,” I said. “And I’ll try to keep it in mind.”

  “Road’s nearly empty,” Paula said, turning and looking around, “and the whole group is belted in. You might as well practice. Give it a shot—try to brake smoothly.”

  I pushed down as slowly as I could on the brake, and felt the drag slowing us down, but then the brakes seemed to grab and the truck jerked a couple of times.

  “You have to lose that habit of pushing harder and harder on the brake,” she said.

  “He sure does,” Ulrike said. “Are you really learning to drive this thing, Lyle?”

  It was a stupid question in a tone that I think was intended to be flattering, so I said, “No, I’m not learning a thing and I haven’t a clue how to do this. Paula put me in this seat because she’s trying to kill us all.”

  Ulrike managed to be perfectly quiet while still letting me know that she was wounded and that I had better apologize. I was really wondering what my other selves, in whatever other worlds, had been thinking, in marrying her. At least I could make a good guess about what they had been thinking in divorcing her.

  The morning and then the afternoon rattled on, bouncing our way along the road that became more and more potholed, more and more badly marked, and more and more deserted, until finally we reached the mostly deserted fortified town of Torreón, the northernmost garrison on Federal Highway 49. Most of the old town was block after block of charred and bulldozed ruins, because as the city had lost most of its population the abandoned buildings had become cover for bandits, rebels, and other marauders, and so the local commandants had gradually smashed down everything outside the fences and walls of the central compound, which embraced the former town hall and church, and surrounded, for a radius of only about a block, what had once been the zócalo.

  Iphwin had set us up with one whole floor of the one surviving large hotel in the compound, and had managed enough bribes to the garrison commander to get us electricity and hot water for the night. “This is it,” he said. “Last comforts, that we know about, anyway. Enjoy it while you can.”

  A day of being shaken around, as we had been in the truck, takes a lot out of you, and everyone elected to eat in our rooms and get to bed early. Helen joined me in my room, just for company, and after the dinner had been delivered, we ate quietly for a while. “Not bad for where we are,” I ventured, at last.

  “The food? Decent, I guess. Though I can see why they shred the beef—there’s probably not a knife that can even scratch the local stuff. But somebody knew his way around the kitchen, and that’s got to be pretty rare in a place this remote.”

  “Isn’t that strange,” I said, having been hit by the thought. “I’ve never really been anywhere remote in my life before, you know. And I bet neither have you.”

  After we’d finished eating, Helen said, “All right, I guess you really did think it was obvious. Why haven’t you ever been anywhere remote before?”

  “Because with the net—and more generally the global information system—everyone’s equally in touch with everyone else. Even across event sequences, as it turns out. In terms of time and effort, which are the meaningful terms, everywhere is the same distance from everywhere else, and that distance is so small it might as well be zero. Now, since we don’t dare to connect to any of the global information system while the mission is on, places are now different distances from each other, and some of those distances are pretty big.”

  She shuddered. “That’s weird. It really makes me feel alone.”

  “I find it pretty weird myself.”

  Helen sat for a long time, staring into space, and then finally said, “Uh, the other night—that wasn’t an act, was it? You really don’t like playing rough in the bedroom?”

  “I really don’t.”

  She sighed. “I was afraid you’d say that. Damn. Lyle, you have no idea how long it took me to find the other Lyle. And I always thought you had just suddenly changed your mind one day. But if the Lyle that likes rough stuff is so uncommon, how come I’ve been with him for so long?”

  I shrugged. “We talked about that before. Obviously there’s some kind of conservation rule happening somewhere that keeps most people relatively near the same event sequence they left— the big jumps are less common. You were in some braid of worlds that included that Lyle. Now you’re on a different braid. Neither you nor I know anything about how many times you’d have to jump to get back on that braid. Or maybe I’ve crossed over into your braid, where you like that kind of thing, and one of the Lyles that you are compatible with is now somewhere else. We don’t have any way of knowing—everyone gets shuffled so much that no one has a ‘home’ or original event sequence, just some places that are more and less familiar.

  “Now that I think of it, it even explains all the odd little coincidences; event sequences that contain a President named Abe Lincoln will tend to be closer to others that contain a president by that name, but he doesn’t have to be exactly the same guy or do the same things. Probably it had something to do with conservation of energy, or with the way the system tried to keep you from noticing the differences between worlds—it’s easier to get the trivial stuff to line up than it is the big things. To keep people from noticing that in some event sequences America was a kingdom ruled by Washington’s heirs, and in others it was a People’s Republic, you have wildly different worlds that all have Pepsi and Coke. That’s part of what keeps people from noticing—most of life is made up of trivia, and if the trivia is consistent, you don’t necessarily notice right away when the big things are different.”

  She suddenly sat bolt upright as if the couch had given her an electric shock. “Oh, my god.”

  “What?”

  “Oh my god. Oh my god. Maybe five times since you started to like it—I mean since
I met the you that liked it... all of a sudden you’ve been struggling and yelling like you’d never had it happen before. I’m in better shape than you are, Lyle, and I hope you don’t mind my pointing out that I’ve got more fighting skills than any version of you I’ve ever run into, and ... I thought they were acting! Shit, those poor guys must have wondered what had gotten into me and must have been scared out of their minds. There was one that... oh, shit, oh shit. What have I done to all those poor guys?” Tears were running down her face.

  “You’d never have done it if you’d known,” I pointed out—a useless observation but the only one I had then. She just started to cry harder, so I eased over next to her and put an arm very awkwardly around her shoulders. Now that I was touching her without being scared to death of her, I could feel that she had a good deal more muscle in her back and shoulders than my Helen did. She also didn’t lean into me in just precisely the way that the Helen I was used to might have—it was clear that I was comforting, but she hadn’t exactly thrown herself into a fit of despair against my shoulder.