The Omega Egg [A Fictionwise Round Robin Novel]

by Mike Resnick;Various Authors

  Spencer considered what his other self had just said. “I suppose that makes sense. Except for the part about you being me from the future.”

  The other Spencer smiled again, a smile of superiority, which annoyed Spencer. “Ah, yes, I remember thinking that. But tell me, after all you've seen, is it so hard to believe in a little time travel as well?”

  Spencer thought back to the otherworldly meadow, when he had somehow managed to summon a past version of wife Carol. “I suppose it's possible,” he said. “But if I did come back from the future to talk to myself, I probably had a damned good reason to do so.”

  “You did. I mean, you do. I mean, I do. I mean, we do.” Still smiling, the future version of Kendell Spencer shook his head. “Time travel. The language just isn't built for it.”

  “I agree. This is ridiculous. I can't think of you as me. How about if I call you—”

  “—Spencer-2? That was what I decided to call my future self back when I was you. So go ahead and think of me as Spencer-2 if that helps.”

  Spencer studied his future self's face for a moment, then sighed. “Spencer-2 it is. So why are you here?”

  Spencer-2 took a deep breath. “Because I think it's about time someone explained to you what's going on.”

  Spencer nodded. “I agree. It's about time someone did. I just didn't expect it to be myself.”

  “Who else can you trust?”

  “Point taken,” Spencer muttered. He looked around. “I just wish we had something to sit on.”

  “Hang on,” Spencer-2 said. He waved his hand, and suddenly they were surrounded by mists of blue, indigo, and violet.

  “What just happened?” Spencer asked.

  “I brought us inside the bellflower,” Spencer-2 said. “We're floating on the edge of the quantum foam.”

  Spencer waited, and when his future self didn't say anything else, he barked out, “So?”

  “So think of a chair and one will appear out of the quantum uncertainties.” Spencer-2 shook his head. “Do I have to think of everything? Wait a minute—I guess I did.”

  “You're kidding? Just think of a chair?”

  “Why not? You've done this sort of thing before.”

  Spencer shrugged, furrowed his brow, and thought as hard as he could of two chairs. Suddenly, two padded comfy chairs emerged from the purple mist that swirled around their feet. Spencer's jaw dropped.

  “Yep, just think of a chair,” Spencer-2 said. He walked over to one of the chairs and gestured at the other. “Shall we get comfortable?”

  The two Spencers sat down, facing each other, while more of the blue, indigo, and purple mists swirled around them.

  “You're disappearing into the fog,” Spencer said.

  Spencer-2 waved his hand again, and the mists between them parted. “Better?”

  “If you call my sitting opposite from my future self inside a bellflower better than being stuck in an antimatter universe with no idea what to do next, I suppose it is,” Spencer replied.

  “Ah, yes, the sarcasm,” Specner-2 said. “It's not going to work on me, Kendell. Remember that I know you better than you know yourself.”

  “I don't doubt it,” Spencer said, “assuming you really are who you claim to be.” He paused. “You promised to explain to me what's going on. So explain already.”

  Spencer-2 nodded. “I will. Let's go through this step by step, shall we? Everything began when Admiral Ktonga summoned you to Goldenmeadow for a mission.”

  “But Ktonga just turned out to be Bob,” Spencer said.

  “Let's not jump ahead of ourselves, Kendell. I'm trying to lay this out step by step to help you understand exactly what's been going on.”

  “Okay, fine. It's probably time for a recap anyway.”

  Spencer-2 smiled. “So I'll go on. Ktonga had received a transmission from a garrison officer on Leonardo, who had discovered something that, and I quote, ‘threatened the very foundations of the galaxy.’ The officer was found dead the next day with a blue bellflower in his hand. So Ktonga sent three operatives, one at a time, to Leonardo—Ramon Boganda, Plibix the dragon, then Patricia ‘Patsy’ Kelvin—to find out what was going on. All three disappeared, so he summoned you to Goldenmeadow, and you volunteered to be the next agent in.”

  “I was drafted, more like it.”

  Spencer-2 shrugged. “I know. After all, I was too. But so much has happened since then that I can't bring myself to feel upset at Ktonga anymore. Shall I go on?”

  Spencer gestured. “Please do.”

  “The moment I—sorry, I mean you—left Ktonga's office, things started to go wrong. Because you, Plibix, and Patricia had your own plan. You didn't take the assignment. Instead, you sent someone else in your place, and you went to meet with Plibix the dragon and his mother the fairy. But you refused to take the egg.”

  “And then the plasma bomb went off.”

  “Yes. You were lucky to escape with your life. In fact, to save your life, Dr. Jen Roper had to put a plastic plate in your head.”

  “I never trusted her.”

  “You were right not to, but we're still getting ahead of ourselves. You and Plibix left for MacDougal II, the only planet where the blue bellflower grows naturally. But Plibix went on his own mission, and Patsy joined you instead.”

  “Undercover.”

  “Well, of course undercover. You're operatives. Anyway, on the ship to MacDougal, you reviewed what you knew of the history of Leonardo. A quantum-entanglement weapon had been used to kill human colonists who attempted to land on Leonardo, and no one knew who was protecting the planet's native race from you.”

  “It couldn't have been the Leonardoins. Their best weapons were spears.”

  “At any rate, when you and Patsy docked at the station above MacDougal II, you opened your stateroom door—”

  “—and I had that vision of the weird guy playing the pipe organ.”

  Spencer-2 nodded. “That still gives me chills when I think about it.”

  “So don't. I've tried not to.”

  “Of course. Anyway, the vision faded, you and Patsy investigated the planet, and found nothing.” He paused. “And in the midst of all this, you slept with Patsy, even though you're married.”

  “It wasn't Patsy! It was Jen. She was trying to get into my head.”

  “She succeeded,” Spencer-2 replied. “Things were rather surreal on MacDougal.”

  “That's what Ramon Boganda said.”

  “Yes. He showed up when you and Patsy were working undercover jobs in the communications building. He was supposed to be protecting Carol and the kids.” He paused. “It was all about payback against Admiral Ktonga and the Space Intelligence Service. You had managed to keep your real loyalties very clandestine when he summoned you. He had no way of knowing that all of his top operatives were now working for Lindsey Parapara.”

  Spencer felt livid. “You're making me sound like a traitor! Parapara created SpaceOp because of Ktonga's mismanagement of the Space Intelligence Service.” He paused. “If you're really the future me, you'd understand.”

  Spencer-2 nodded. “I do. You're thinking of our first wife, Laura, killed years ago by an enemy operative. But as much as it pains me to say, that's not important right now.”

  “Then what is?” Spencer asked with a snarl.

  “The fact that everything started to go weird on MacDougal. That was when Ramon warned you and Patsy that the barriers were breaking between dimensions, between universes.”

  “That was also when Plibix faded away, right before our eyes,” Spencer said.

  “And shortly afterwards, the real Patsy—excuse me, Patricia—showed up. All that time you had been working with an impostor.”

  “As I said, it was Jen.”

  “But you didn't know that until Patricia showed up.”

  Spencer waved his hands. “Forget that. The important thing is that we went after the bellflower smuggling ring. And then Carol managed to get in touch with me across the dimens
ions.”

  “And revealed to you more than you realized,” Spencer-2 said. “That the Leonardoins had discovered a way to turn thought into reality.

  Spencer looked into the distance, at the indigo swirls. “I was trapped in an otherworldly universe with some creature...”

  “And you broke yourself out.”

  Spencer snapped his fingers. “And I met up with Parapara, who revealed to me that she was really two eons-old aliens, Para One and Para Two, whose race was experimenting with our reality. She somehow teleported me to Leonardo to find the device that allowed her race to tinker with my universe, so I could destroy it.”

  “And you got shot.”

  “But I made it to a shelter. And then I found the device.”

  “Not before the universe started to warp again,” Spencer-2 said. “You found your past changing. And then you ran into Plibix again, who still had the egg.”

  “But I left Plibix. I went to that meadow. I met that Guardian, who told me that Bob was behind it all. And I used the power of the egg to summon all my allies to me to fight Bob.”

  “Well, we'll get to that in a moment. At any rate, your plan to defeat Bob almost worked too. But you were separated from your allies, surprised from behind by Admrial Ktonga, who turned out to be Bob. He took you along with him, and eventually you got away from him. And then you fell through the bellflower.”

  “And then you found me and here we are.”

  “Precisely.” Spencer-2 leaned back in his chair and put his fingertips together. “Do you understand now?”

  Spencer shook his head. “Understand what? None of this makes any sense.”

  “Finally!” Spencer-2 shouted with obvious glee. “You understand. You're ready.”

  “Ready for what?”

  “For the explanation. Of what's really been going on behind the scenes, from the day Ktonga summoned you to Goldenmeadow.”

  And then suddenly Spencer-2 vanished.

  * * * *

  Damn it, Spencer thought. Just when the answer was within my grasp.

  He pushed himself out of his chair and walked the few steps over to the other chair. Indentations still marked the cushions, and they felt warm to his touch.

  What do I do now?

  Wait a second! Spencer-2 had said that this place was filled with quantum foam, and all Spencer had to do is think of something and would appear. He had done this before, when he had summoned his SpaceOp allies to assist him.

  He sat back down in his own chair and concentrated on summoning his future self out of the time stream. And suddenly Spencer-2 reappeared in the chair. He looked different, though. He had a full beard and was wearing a Hawaiian shirt.

  Spencer-2 yawned and stretched. “Ah, that's more like it. Thanks, Spencer.”

  “I did it,” Spencer said, amazed at his own abilities.

  Spencer-2 nodded. “Yep. You did. I knew you could do it, even though it took a month.”

  “Month? It's only been a few minutes.”

  “Time travel, remember? I've been gone for a month. Nice long vacation with Carol and the kids, now that all this mishegoss is over.” He smiled and sighed contentedly. “Something for you to look forward to, if you survive.”

  “Why did you disappear in the first place?”

  Spencer-2 scratched his ear and looked away. “Ah. Yes. Well, sorry about that. Eddies in the time stream.”

  “Who's Eddie?”

  “Not Eddie, a person. Eddies. Currents. They swept me away. I couldn't get back until you summoned me.”

  “Well, before they take you away again, could you finally explain why things have been so surreal ever since Admiral Ktonga summoned me to Goldenmeadow? My life was never like this when I worked for the Space Intelligence Service. Or even when I changed my loyalties to SpaceOp.”

  “Okay, I will. But I have to go back a little further.”

  “Whatever you need to do to make sense of this whole thing,” Spencer said, leaning back. “I'm all ears.”

  Suddenly, Spencer's ears grew to enormous proportions as the rest of his body began to shrink. Spencer-2 sighed. “You've got to be careful what you say inside the bellflower, Spencer. Want to fix yourself?”

  Spencer thought of himself as normal. His ears stopped growing and began to shrink, and the rest of his body expanded, until finally he was himself again. “What I mean is, I'm ready to listen.”

  “Okay. Here goes.” Spencer-2 took a deep breath. “In the beginning, about thirteen point seven billion years ago, the universe was created.”

  “Wait a moment! You have to go back that far?”

  “Don't worry. I'll be skipping most of those billions of years soon. But yeah, I have to go back that far to explain what's going on.”

  Spencer shook his head. “Fine. What does the birth of the universe have to do with recent events?”

  “Very simply, when the universe was born, it wasn't alone. A myriad number of alternate universes were created along with it. Including one singular universe, whose structure was composed of antimatter instead of regular matter.”

  “I think I already know this.”

  “Yes, but what you don't know is that the antimatter universe's history paralleled your own. Every event that happened in your particular universe also happened in the antimatter universe. Every single person who was born, lived, loved, and died in your universe had a counterpart on the antimatter universe.”

  “That's statistically impossible.”

  “No, it's just statistically unlikely. With a practically infinite number of positive matter universes around, it was inevitable that the antimatter universe's timeline would parallel one of them. It just so happens to have been yours.”

  “But that means—”

  “Yes, it does. There's an antimatter version of you around. When you first met me, you wondered if I was the antimatter version of yourself. I'm not, but there is one. And for lack of a better name, we can call him the Anti-Spencer. And it's the Anti-Spencer, not Bob, who's the villain behind everything that's happened to you.”

  “You have got to be kidding. If the antimatter universe is just like mine, why would the Anti-Spencer be after me?”

  “Yeah, I doubted this part of the conversation too,” Spencer-2 said. “But here's the missing piece. It's true that the antimatter universe played out just like your matter universe. But in the end, there was one significant difference.”

  He stopped talking and looked off into the distance. “And what was that difference?” Spencer finally asked.

  “Sorry. I was hoping to spare you, and therefore me, some bad memories. But I guess I have no choice.” He paused. “You remember when Laura died?”

  Spencer remembered vividly. “She was killed during a mission for the Service,” he said softly. “Which is why I joined SpaceOp.”

  “Yes. Well, the Anti-Spencer took the death of his Anti-Laura a lot more seriously. He left the Service completely, rebuffed SpaceOp's offer, and became a physicist. A cosmologist, to be exact. He studied time travel, hoping that he could figure out a way to go back in time and undo his wife's death.”

  “That sounds dangerous.”

  “It is dangerous. Mucking about in the time stream can cause the universe to fall apart. Think about what's happened to you. But to make a long story short, the Anti-Spencer discovered that he couldn't travel back to just any point in time. The equations only allowed for him to view the creation of the universe. And so he got it into his head that if he could understand how the universe was created, he could recreate it in a way that would keep Anti-Laura alive.”

  “That doesn't sound like me at all.”

  “It isn't you. The problem was that the parallelism wasn't perfect. The antimatter universe's balance was just a little bit off, and it was the death of the Anti-Laura that tipped it over.”

  “There's no way Laura and I are that important in the grand scheme of things,” Spencer said.

  “Somebody has to be that important. It jus
t turned out to be you.”

  “So what happened?”

  “What happened was that the Anti-Spencer discovered that his universe was not the only one in existence. He actually witnessed the creation of the myriad positive matter universes, and realized that he could harness their power for himself, provided he destroyed them one at a time. But he can't do that without first taking over and destroying the positive matter universe that most closely resonates with his own.” Spencer-2 paused. “And that's our universe.”

  Spencer shook his head in disbelief. “This sounds like the plot of a bad comic book.”

  “A very good one, actually,” Spencer-2 said.

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “I don't believe it.”

  “Neither did I,” Spencer-2 said, “but don't worry, you will. The Anti-Spencer realized that there was only one way he could break through to our universe to confront you. And that was by a combination of a blue bellflower and the quantum entanglement weapon being used to protect the Leonardoins. He had no way of getting to you once he breached the barrier, so he had to figure out how to get you to come to Leonardo. He started by manipulating reality on Leonardo, frightening the garrison officers there. His plan was to spook them so much that Admiral Ktonga would be forced to send you to investigate. But there was a problem. By the time the antimatter version of Kendell Spencer came along, you had already left the service. So the adventure he set you on wasn't a simple one, because with every attempt to get you to Leonardo, he knew you would resist. So the Anti-Spencer had to continue working behind the scenes, manipulating reality off its most probable courses, until it brought you here.”

  “Hold on a second,” Spencer said, shaking his head. “You mean everything that I went through, all the bizarre, surreal experiences I had, all the revelations of who was actually manipulating my life—that was all fake?”

  Spencer-2 nodded, then stopped. “Well, not quite. It wasn't fake. You really did live through all that surrealism. But what you didn't know at the time was the it was part of a bigger battle. The Anti-Spencer was manipulating your reality, and subconsciously you were manipulating it right back. But because you didn't know who you were really fighting, you didn't have a chance to defeat him. Now you do.”