Regarding Ducks and Universes

by Neve Maslakovic

  It was time to catch that taxi. There were none to be seen.

  Why did I need a taxi anyway? I was a man in the prime of my life, just at the three-and-a-half decade mark, and perfectly capable of walking to my hotel. In fact, it was probably a good way to set about reducing the pesky convexness of my stomach. True, it was a little cold, but, it being San Francisco, there was a good chance the fog would clear up any minute. I adjusted the backpack more comfortably across my shoulders and set a course along Hyde Street in the direction of Broadway.

  Before I had barely covered a block, a short honk rose above the street noise. A car, one of those with a top that opens up, as indeed it was open now, had slowed down to a crawl next to me. The almost-dog Murphina, her woolly white coat flattened by the westerly wind, sat comfortably ensconced in the front passenger seat of the cucumber-green vehicle. “Can we give you a lift?” Murphina’s owner asked from behind the steering wheel. He gestured toward the only unoccupied seat in the car, next to the A-dweller (or B-dweller) who had attracted attention in the crossing chamber and who was sitting composedly in the back, the white scarf tied around her hair just touching the tangerine dress, her gray eyes fixed on me.

  “Thanks,” I said, “but I think I’ll walk. I need the exercise.”

  The lanky A-dweller leaned across Murphina and handed me a business card. “We’ll see you around, then.”

  I glanced at the card—Past & Future, it said and was otherwise blank—as they reentered the traffic stream and disappeared down the street.

  [3]

  A BIT OF GOOD NEWS

  The following morning found me at the Queen Bee Inn, a three-story Victorian row house nestled between neighboring Victorians on a hill overlooking the bay. Behind the highly polished antique front desk sat Franny, a petite silver-haired woman with a square chin. “I hope you enjoyed your night in the Lilac Room, Citizen Sayers. There was a call for you early this morning, but Regulation 3 protects the personal information of our guests, so we did not disclose that you were here. But I know our guests don’t mind if we get to know them better—”

  Franny had already ascertained what my business on this world was (“just a tourist”) and what I did in life and even that I was single.

  “Someone was looking for me? That’s strange,” I said. “I don’t know anyone in town.”

  “Seemed like a nice young man. Curly hair, prominent nose.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell. What was the name?”

  “Didn’t leave a name, Franny,” a male voice called out from the back room.

  “Of course he left a name, dear,” Franny called back and reached for a message ledger. She opened it and started turning the pages. “Now where—”

  My stomach tightened with late-morning hunger and, as I waited, I went through a quick mental list of restaurants that served nice, big breakfasts. It didn’t seem right that I was forgoing Coconut Café (Did it exist here?) and its weekend pancake special because of some impractical rule about avoiding familiar places. Would it really do much harm to jump in a people mover—that is, hail a taxi—and take a little drive to see if Coconut Café was in its place on El Camino Real in the Redwood Grove neighborhood and if their menu included pecan pancakes?

  Luckily I had chosen the Queen Bee Inn. Breakfast was included, already paid for, and set in a buffet in a cozy room to the right of the stairs.

  Franny tapped the message ledger. “Here it is, two calls, one right after another. The first citizen, the one with the prominent nose, didn’t leave a message. The second caller—voice only, that one—she said she was trying to get in touch with Citizen Sayers of Universe A because of a development of mutual interest. Didn’t leave a name either.”

  A petite silver-haired man with a square chin came in from the back room carrying a cloth and what looked like furniture polish. “Didn’t I tell you that, Franny?”

  “You were right, dear.”

  He grunted in response and, nodding at me in passing, headed for the row of cubbies where antique keys hung under room names.

  “Start with the Rose Room keys, Trevor, dear. We’re expecting newlyweds today.” Echoing my earlier breakfast worries, she added, “I wanted to make sure you’d been warned about the Lunch-Place Rule, Citizen Sayers, before heading out to see the city—”

  I had approached the front desk looking for tour brochures.

  “—because it’s better not to compare things between our world and your world, that’s for sure,” she added.

  Trevor grunted again in agreement without bothering to look up from the large key he had begun polishing.

  “Though I have to admit I’ve always wondered what Franny A and Trevor A named their inn. The Queen Bee, the B is for the universe, you see. Used to be the Tipsy Sailor.” She sighed. “What a year 1986 was—we were young and had just bought the inn and were struggling to keep it in business…and then to find out that Professor Singh had made a copy of the universe and everything in it! And we were still getting used to solid ground.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Trevor and I were born and raised on an ocean liner, the Two Thousand Sails, have you heard of it? We were educated by reading and by traveling the world. The day we married, we got off at the closest port and settled down for good. The port happened to be Oakland, just north of here. They raised the Golden Gate Bridge and we sailed into the bay.”

  “That,” Trevor said, still polishing the same key, “was then.”

  “Quite right, dear. The ship wouldn’t fit under the bridge nowadays.”

  “Why not?” I asked, curious. “The old Golden Gate Bridge is a drawbridge, isn’t it?”

  “The ocean level is too high, Citizen Sayers. The drawbridge leaves don’t raise far enough.”

  “Speaking of the old bridge—”

  “That’s right, Citizen Sayers, you were asking about tours. I must say it’s nice to see an A-dweller on vacation. So many seem to come only for business.”

  “People have to earn a living, don’t they,” grumbled Trevor, which might have been the longest sentence I’d heard him utter yet. He hung up the newly cleaned key and picked up another.

  “Everyone needs a vacation, no matter what their job is, I say,” Franny shot back, briefly sounding like Wagner, my boss, commanding one of his employees to take time off. “And you are a culinary writer, how nice,” she added more mildly, nodding toward me from behind the front desk. “Do you write restaurant reviews?”

  “No.”

  “Cookbooks, then?”

  “I put together user guides for culinary products.”

  “Well, how nice. What kind of culinary products do you make user guides for?”

  “All of them. I work for a kitchenware company,” I said, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. Honestly, it was like the woman had never heard of DIM’s Regulation 3 (citizen privacy).

  “Oh, a kitchenware company?” She paused, inviting more details, but none were forthcoming. “Well, how nice. Let me get you the tour brochures. By far the best way to get to know the city. Our Universe A guests are always surprised how different everything is, forgetting that we didn’t have the earthquake here, of course.”

  She went into the back room for the brochures and I switched my weight back to the other foot, the blisters on them being painful proof of Franny’s words. The city was different, as I had found out while looking for the Queen Bee Inn. Having declined the ride from Murphina and her entourage, I’d headed away from the crossing terminal eager to see more of this town that bore the same name as the one I’d just crossed over from, the letter appended at the end seeming something of an afterthought. But not long passed before my step had slowed down to the hesitant gait of a tourist in a foreign land. Hyde Street was where it was supposed to be, and so was Broadway, but where was Memorial Park with its familiar macar trees and the arrow-shaped fountain pointing toward the ocean? Everything felt slightly off, like being served chocolate mousse on a paper plate or w
ine in a mug. I tried one street that I thought should lead toward the bay, then backtracked and tried another. It didn’t help that the fog, instead of dissipating, had continued rolling in from the ocean, shrouding everything in a cool, smoky mist and making me wish I’d brought not sunglasses but gloves though it was mid-July.

  San Francisco is a hilly town. As I trekked up one of the bigger hills to the faint distant sound of the foghorn, I came upon a row of Chinese restaurants and tourist shops. The restaurants had looked inviting, and the wise thing to do would have been to go in for an early dinner, then call a taxi. Wise, yes. Human nature, no. Reluctant to admit defeat, I pressed on. After all, my map had shown the inn to be only fifteen stadia from the crossing terminal, a distance which had looked perfectly manageable—and misleadingly flat—on my omni screen.

  By the time I found the Queen Bee Inn a couple of steep blocks away from the bay, the sun was low in the sky, my hair was damp from the fog, and I had developed a deep hate of my backpack. I checked in, trudged up the stairs to the Lilac Room, which had a view of the parking lot and not the bay, kicked the sandals off my aching feet, and sat down on the bed determined not to move until morning. For dinner I ordered delivery from a local (and, as per the Lunch-Place Rule, unfamiliar) Chinese restaurant and spent the rest of the evening pleasantly enough, rereading The Red-Headed League. I ultimately drifted off to sleep with the thought that Holmes (had he been a real person) would have loathed having an alter—Holmes B, the ultimate adversary, even more so than a doubled Professor Moriarty, competing with Holmes A at every turn for the distinction of solving the next great case. It occurred to me that Hercule Poirot would have been none too pleased either, but Miss Marple would simply have invited the other Miss Marple over for afternoon tea, and Lord Peter Wimsey—well, the Lords Peter Wimsey would have studied each other across the room through their matching monocles—

  “Citizen Sayers?” Franny had placed several tour brochures on the desk in front of me. “Our breakfast area, the Nautical Nook, is through the glass doors there.”

  “I’ll bring these back when I’m done with them.”

  “You can keep the brochures, Citizen Sayers.”

  “Right.” I was used to plastic, not the use-once-then-toss-out philosophy of paper products.

  Speaking of paper—

  It was the logical place to begin. Why had I not thought of it before?

  “One more thing,” I interrupted Franny, who had turned to help Trevor clean keys. “Is there a store nearby that sells tr—that sells paper books?”

  “Oh, what kind of books do you read, Citizen Sayers?”

  “Cookbooks and history of cooking for work, mystery classics for fun.”

  “How nice. There is a bookstore a few blocks up Starfish Lane. You could take a cable car, but it’ll be faster to walk. Our Universe A guests often ask about bookstores—books made of paper are a waste of trees, they’ll say to me—nothing easier than reaching for the omni around your neck to find a good read. I don’t know about that. Never liked that weirdly shaped screen and all those pictures and whatnots marring the good old-fashioned written word. In any case, don’t judge us too harshly, Citizen Sayers. This world might not be as good as yours when it comes to preserving nature, but we have our good points too.”

  “Of course,” I said quickly, avoiding looking at the dozen paper brochures she had just given me. “As a matter of fact, I’ve recently finished putting together a user guide for a kitchen accessory invented by a B-dweller. A potato-peeler-slicer-fryer.”

  “That’s kind of you to say, Citizen Sayers. It’s the little things that often matter the most, isn’t it? We all have to do our part.”

  Trevor dropped a set of keys with a clang and reached for more polish.

  As I went through the glass doors into the Nautical Nook, I overheard Franny say, “Citizen Sayers seems like a nice young man.”

  A pleasant stroll along Starfish Lane, with its tiny flower shops, specialty shoe stores, and boutiques, brought me to the front of a large store that spanned almost half a block. The sign above the doors said, The Bookworm. I realized I had walked by it yesterday while looking for the inn without realizing what it was. A colorful display of maps, travel guides, and double globes in one of the windows caught my eye and I stopped for a moment before going in.

  Summer is our slow season at work—too hot, Wagner likes to say, for customers to think about cooking. Every year, reasoning that his employees’ kitchen-product-idea-generating and user-guide-writing skills could always benefit from new experiences, he signs us up for travel sites which clog our omnis with ads touting sandy beaches and ancient ruins. (I think Wagner overestimates how much he pays us.) I had been wavering between joining Egg and Rocky on their hiking holiday and taking a train tour of the wine country. Going to Universe B had never entered my mind. Too expensive. Egg and Rocky had left earlier in the week to hike the Sierras. As for me—well, I had found out that my official birth date was wrong, that I was older than I thought, and that I had an alter. I’d emptied my bank account, bought my ticket, made my reservations at the Queen Bee Inn, and packed my bag. Beyond that—

  I was here now.

  I went in.

  It was a store with, well, books in it.

  There were many: Books on tables. Books on bookshelves. Books of all sizes, colors and, presumably, subject matter, filling the available space from wall to wall.

  Near the entrance I noticed a table labeled Bestsellers and picked up at random one of the books stacked on it. The book felt surprisingly light. The description on the back promised a riveting story of love and revenge in the Wild West, penned by an author whose grasp of historical accuracy, judging by the dirt-free and perfectly toothed intertwined duo on the front cover, seemed to be lacking. I took a peek inside the book—there were no further images, not even ads, just text—then put the bestseller back on the stack of identical books and proceeded deeper into the bookstore. It was quiet. Not a museum kind of quiet, more of an upscale-restaurant-that-serves-wine-no-soda kind. I was one of a handful of customers scattered throughout. A single clerk stood at a row of registers attending to a sale. Among the neatly packed shelves, in the very center of the store, a wide curving staircase led to an upper floor.

  Tree books. I did not recall reading them, though I must have as a child, before the Great Recycling Push of the 1990s. It was then that luxury paper items had been collected and turned into paper products whose job could not be taken over by omnis. Toilet paper. Cardboard boxes. Egg cartons.

  But that was in Universe A.

  An angular face with a strong nose and an s-shaped pipe stared at me from a cover. (In the midst of reading the Sherlock Holmes stories, I had automatically gone to look for them.) I took the book off the shelf and opened it. This one had a few illustrations. I chose a page and read a bit, the paragraph being a letter to Holmes by the woman, Irene Alder, then flicked my fingers—and shook my head and advanced the page by hand, though with some trouble because the pages stuck together slightly—and read some more. The font was tiny, the lines too close together, and the page lacked color. Even so, the book had a charm of its own, like an old mortar and pestle sitting on a counter in a home kitchen.

  The outer wrapper, in addition to the drawing of the Great Detective on the front, had a somewhat sensationalistic synopsis on the back. Genuine Morocco leather, it advertised. Red silk ribbon bookmark. I searched for the price, found it in the lower right corner, and let out a gasp. Four hundred dollars! Everything was more expensive here—their runaway inflation had been faster—but that was still quite steep. Perhaps a smaller book, one of the ones with the flimsy covers, would be more in line with what a tourist from afar could afford, I thought, gingerly sliding the Holmes back in its place among fellow editions bearing Sir Conan Doyle’s name.

  I took a moment to run my hand along the spines of the C-to-D books in what was clearly the section of the bookstore devoted to novels of all kinds. Agatha Chri
stie, with a long row of mysteries overflowing from one shelf to the one below it. (Eighty plus novels—where had she found the time?—took up a lot of space.) Below, I saw Dickens, Dostoevsky, Dumas, others. I tried to imagine my novel-to-be—once I got around to writing it—sitting on a shelf waiting to entice a customer into parting with a bit of hard-earned cash. I failed. The prospect of creating an object you could hold in your hand seemed fraught with more problems than creating an omni memory link nestled among countless others. What if, for instance, you made a typo and noticed it after the book got printed, when it was too late to correct it? And what did authors do when they needed images to convey settings and plot points too difficult to describe in words? And if readers didn’t like a book, all they could do was to dispose of it in the thrash after having purchased it, there being no possibility of a free preview—a waste of money and resources. No way of obtaining feedback from readers, no comments section to fill up with praise or criticism of the book. Perhaps, all things considered, it was a good thing that I didn’t live here in Universe B, given all their peculiarities.

  Suddenly I remembered why I was here in the first place.

  Quite calmly, I located section S several bookcases behind me.

  Bent down, looked. Double-checked—

  And breathed again.

  It wasn’t there.

  As my heart, beating as rapidly and insistently as Poe’s telltale one, started to subside to its normal rhythm, I heard a light cough behind me.

  “Can I help you find something?” It was a bookstore employee.

  “No, thank you. I was just looking for—a book.”

  “Did you find it?”

  “No, but—”

  “Let’s look, then.” She pushed her horn-rimmed glasses up toward the top of her nose and looked at me expectantly. “What’s the title?”

  “Er—I’m not sure—that is, I have no idea whether it even exists—”