Regarding Ducks and Universes

by Neve Maslakovic

  Rubbing my forehead, which had started to throb, I wondered again how Wagner had found out I was quarantined. I really should call him back, I thought; he was my boss and a friend and was concerned about me. And wasn’t there someone else I had meant to call, someone important?

  I stretched my back, stiff from standing hunched over the infoterminal. It struck me that I hadn’t accomplished much in Universe B other than managing to lose my Y-day photo.

  Felix B had written a book. No, he hadn’t written a book.

  Yes he had, no he hadn’t.

  Did it matter, really? The whole issue suddenly seemed silly, like the memory of my nightmare exposed as foolishness by the morning sun, its intangible reality receding and making room for the voice of daytime reason and light.

  I was struck by the cleverness and beauty of that description.

  Then another thought struck me.

  Of course. It was all so simple.

  I had been in a bookstore just yesterday—if the man had written any books, I would have seen them. My troubles were over. I laughed out loud, then stopped because the sound made my head hurt worse.

  A face, the security guard’s, appeared on the other side of the glass square situated at eye level in the door, then disappeared just as quickly. I turned to go and almost ran into Bean.

  “Hello, Bean of the Passivist parents and believer that math underlies everything.”

  She looked at me, then shrugged off whatever was on her mind. “Do you want to go for a walk? I figured out how to get to the roof.”

  “Why not? Maybe it will help my headache.”

  “The stairs are this way and around the corner. My room doesn’t have a window, does yours?” She was talking and walking rather fast, it seemed to me. “I feel like we’re in a submarine, not that I’ve ever been in one. Well, I suppose I have, there’s the one that’s the naval museum—do you have the museum in Universe A?—I forget which pier it’s moored at—anyway, I feel cooped up and I have a project I should be working on. No, don’t ask me what it is, I can’t say. It’s against the rules.”

  “What isn’t, these days?” I said, trying to keep up.

  “Calculating pi to a ridiculously impractical number of digits. Taking belly dancing classes. Eating ice cream.” She shrugged. “Heaps of fun things are not against the rules.”

  I stopped to retie my gown, which had started to sag in the back, allowing my undershirt to be seen, and noticed we were in front of James’s room. “James is looking for me, I’ve heard,” I whispered, “but I’ve decided he’s the most likely of us to be infected.”

  “Here, let me help you. I feel sorry for him, you know. Everybody seems to dislike him.”

  She seemed very interested in James’s problems.

  “People who take pets along when traveling are just inviting trouble,” I pointed out as she pulled the sash of the gown tight in the back, making me end the sentence with a gasp. “Unless he was already exhibiting abnormal behavior by bringing Murphina,” I amended my statement. “You know what really worries me? If we did start acting strangely and abnormally, how would we know if it was because of the pet bug or because we lost one too many brain cells during the crossing?”

  Dr. Gomez-Herrera came out of James’s room studying a chart, looked up, and asked how we were doing.

  “Feeling a bit cooped in,” Bean said.

  “I’ve had a breakthrough regarding his book. It’s all well and good. Wait—I’ve just remembered Aunt Hen’s photo is missing. That, and my head hurts.” I hiccupped.

  Dr. Gomez-Herrera sent a sharp look in my direction, made a quick, illegible note on her chart, then hurried along into the next room. Bean and I proceeded to the end of the hallway, through a door marked Health Center Employees Only, and up a narrow staircase. At the top, a heavy door opened onto a wide, flat roof, the same one where the flier had deposited me yesterday. Squinting against the bright light, I joined Bean at the railing. The air was dry and warm. Neighborhoods lay packed between us and the bay, residential areas intertwined with shops and restaurants and offices where citizens went about their usual business. With a start I realized that it was, in fact, the place of my usual business.

  “We’re in Redwood Grove,” I said, surprised.

  “It’s Palo Alto,” Bean shook her head.

  “No, it’s not.”

  “We are in the Palo Alto Health Center, Felix. This is their railing.”

  “I’m telling you, it’s Redwood Grove.” I looked around trying to spot the waterside complex that housed my small ground-floor apartment, but had trouble orienting myself. “Over there,” I pointed, “yes, I’m pretty sure that’s where my bicycle and I catch a people mover every morning. The people mover takes us downtown, then I bike to my office at Wagner’s Kitchen. And every afternoon I bike back to the station, hop on the people mover, and come back.”

  “Redwood—oh, I know. Town name changes, one of the Department of Information Management’s first projects. To avoid inter-universe confusion and for an additional layer of privacy. For some reason they didn’t bother with large cities, only with small towns. Imagine the paperwork involved.”

  I draped myself over the railing. “Do you think that if we spit straight down there’s any chance we might infect someone and cause all sorts of trouble?”

  “Are you feeling all right, Felix?”

  “Look at them,” I gestured at the pedestrians in the street below us. “They’re like ants in a beehive—anthill—rushing this way and that, here and there. Not interacting, just passing each other without a glance.” The throbbing in my head was making it hard to think. “Can you imagine in some small town a hundred years ago, walking by another person without a word or a nod—not even robbing them, at least? Sometimes I wish I’d lived in the old days, when everything was slower and no one had to rush, when there was time to think things over.”

  “Isn’t this what life is all about?” was her take on the bustling street below. “Moving from place to place, from activity to activity. You stop and you’re dead.”

  That was somewhat morbid of her, I felt, especially in a health center.

  “I’m a non-Passivist. I believe in getting things done,” she explained. “An Activist, if you will.”

  “I’m a duplicate.”

  She turned her head to look at me.

  “I have an alter,” I clarified, unnecessarily.

  “You know, it’s not anything anyone would guess. You don’t look old enough.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll be thirty-five tomorrow, instead of six months from now. I just found that out a few weeks ago. Long story. The point is—I have an alter. And he may have already beaten me to it and written my book. No, wait,” I said, grabbing hold of the sides of my head and trying to wrestle a thought out of my muddled brain. “I solved that one already. If Felix had a book I would have seen it in the Bookworm—why is it called that, do paper books have worms, like apples sometimes do?”

  “A book? I thought you wrote user guides for Wagner’s Kitchen.”

  “That’s just my real-life job,” I said testily.

  “So that’s why you came here, to see if he wrote a book. I was wondering. What kind of book?”

  “A mystery novel.”

  “You’ve written one, then?”

  “I’m still working out the plot,” I said haughtily. “In my head.”

  “There you are.”

  Chang was standing behind us. “Dr. Gomez-Herrera says you’re not feeling yourself this morning, Felix. I’m afraid you’ve come down with the pet bug. Let’s go downstairs and see what we can do to make you feel better. Besides, no patients allowed on the roof.”

  [9]

  UNIVERSE MAKER

  The fog in my brain, which turned out to be not a symptom of the North American Pet Syndrome but a side effect of the medication, dissipated by morning with an adjustment of the dose and I got up my normal self and called Noor & Brood before breakfast from the hallway infote
rminal.

  “We found him,” Mrs. Noor said after I explained where I was and that I’d be getting out of the health center today.

  “Where?”

  “What I can tell you for now is that he is single and resides in apartment 003 in building J at the Egret’s Nest Apartment Complex in Palo Alto. That’s near the bay.”

  “Interesting,” I said.

  “As to his job—”

  “Yes?” I said, my heart stopping.

  “He is a chef.”

  “He’s a what?”

  “A chef at the newly renovated Organic Oven Restaurant downtown.”

  “Huh. Anything else?”

  “We’ll keep digging,” she promised, waved bye, and disconnected.

  Some people, I suppose, might wonder why I didn’t try to contact Felix B then and there and claim him as a long-lost family member—but I bet those people don’t have alters. It was simple. Regulation 7 was just an excuse. I was afraid of finding out that he’d done a better job of living my life.

  At least, I reflected as I turned away from the infoterminal, it seemed he had a real-world occupation and wasn’t spending his days penning mysteries.

  The same was true for me, of course.

  I headed to the cafeteria and upon walking in saw two uniformed DIM officials at a table by the door. They seemed to be taking statements and didn’t look up as I walked past. Sitting across from them was Quarantine Case 15, the father of the family with the two kids. As I walked by, I heard him say, “—we can’t talk about it, is this what you are saying—”

  “That is correct, Citizen Doolittle.”

  “—and we have to sign where?—”

  I continued past to the food table and picked up a croissant, there not being anything that fell into the cheese-chocolate-or-nuts category of foods that I could taste, and a reddish tea. Bean was sitting as far away as possible from the DIM officials, which considering the size of the cafeteria, was not very far.

  “What’s going on over there?” I asked her, placing my tray down across from her fruit plate. My head had stopped throbbing, which was a nice change; I had spent most of yesterday, after our rooftop excursion, holed up in my room with a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door.

  “The DIMs? They are making everyone sign information-halt agreements before we leave.”

  “About the pet bug?”

  She speared a strawberry on her plate with a fork. “Yup. We can’t talk about the pet bug or the quarantine.”

  “To the media?”

  “Or anyone else.”

  “Surely they don’t mean anyone?”

  “Haven’t you ever had to sign a highly restrictive information-halt agreement?”

  “But—I’ve already talked to two people about it, my boss and a private det—and someone else.”

  “They had me sign as soon as I came in the door and tried to give me a cover story, which was that I was admitted to the health center due to laryngitis.” She picked up her tea mug and clutched it with both hands. “I told them laryngitis wouldn’t work since—like you—I’d already talked to someone, a fellow graduate student, and he—Arni—would have noticed if I’d been unable to talk. That seemed to annoy them, but it’s not my fault they waited ‘til Monday morning to have us sign. So, it’s not laryngitis, but suspected appendicitis. Of course,” she took a serene sip of the tea, “there’s the small matter of me already having told Arni about the pet bug when I called to tell him I’d be late coming into the Bihistory Institute today, if they let me out. I didn’t feel compelled to mention that to the DIMs.”

  The officials had finished with quarantine cases 15 and 16 and now had their kids at the table. I heard the younger of the kids exclaim, “Ooh, a secret.”

  “So they want the story to die down,” I said, peering into my mug and sloshing the tea around. “At least there’ll be no lawsuits against James. After all, it’s hardly the man’s fault Murphina caught the pet bug,” I added, though I was irked that the pet bug quarantine had so completely thwarted my plan to stay off the radar of local DIM officials. Hoping they wouldn’t ask me too many questions, I was prepared to tell them that I was looking forward to riding the Baker Beach Ferris wheel.

  Bean, who also seemed discomfited by the presence of the DIM officials, gave an almost imperceptible shrug and speared another berry. “Tell me about your childhood, Felix. What was it like?”

  I sat up a bit in my chair. She wanted to know more about me. “Well,” I said, blowing out my chest and deciding to begin at the beginning, “I was born in Carmel. A year or two later my parents quit their art gallery jobs, adjusted some paperwork—like I said, it’s a long story, ask me about it some other time—and we moved to San Francisco. After high school—I’ll tell you my high school stories another time too—I went off to the San Diego Four-Year and my parents moved back to Carmel. They opened their own art gallery but died in a boat accident shortly after. As for me, after I got out of school, I got a job putting together user manuals at Wagner’s Kitchen and have been doing that ever since. That’s my history in a nutshell. Speaking of history, that’s your field of study, isn’t it?” I added, taking a cautious sip of the tea.

  “Bihistory is more related to what used to be called physics than to history.”

  “Oh. Because I was going to ask you my indoor plumbing question. When was it invented? I’ve always wondered which of my ancestors had to, er—squat in fields and who got to sit down.” I noticed that the DIM officials were now interviewing Gabriella Love, their avocado uniforms presenting quite a contrast to her pink robe. She didn’t look too pleased about being held up on her way to the food table.

  “That’s a math problem,” Bean said of the plumbing question.

  “Because everything is a math problem.”

  “Exactly. How many ancestors do you think you had in the year, let’s say, one?”

  “One what?” Having decided that it was either hibiscus or African rooibos, not cherry, I had more of the tea.

  “Year one. You know, one BC, skip zero, one AD, two AD, and so on.”

  “Oh, year one, I see. How many ancestors did I have? I don’t know, a few thousand or so?” I broke a piece off the croissant and began eating.

  She reached for a knife and a fork and methodically attacked the crescent-shaped melon wedge on her plate. “You have two parents”—she sliced the wedge in half—” four grandparents”—cut, cut into quarters—” and eight great-grandparents”—cut, cut, cut, cut. “The number of ancestors doubles in each generation going back in time, a new generation appearing every thirty years or so.” She paused to eat one of the tiny great-grandparent melon pieces. “In twenty centuries we have about sixty generations. Starting with you and doubling the number of people in each step in a geometric progression, we get two, four, eight, sixteen, and so on, all the way to two raised to the sixtieth power. That, Felix, is a very large number, more than a billion billion people.” She went back to eating the melon.

  “But wait,” I protested. “How can that be? There aren’t a billion billion people now, even with two universes, much less in the ancient world. I can’t possibly have had that many ancestors.”

  “Duplicates. Shared branches in the family tree. Your parents might have had the same great-great-great-grandfather, for instance. People used to marry their cousins all the time.”

  “Duplicates.”

  “Well, er—yes. Which prunes down your family tree and intertwines its branches. Because, of course, the number of people in the world tends to get smaller as you go back in time. All the way back to that one curious toddler who was just a tad smarter than the rest of the kids in her ape family. Just think how much she must have vexed her parents.”

  “History is always interesting,” I said, chewing on the croissant and thinking that it needed butter. “All those things that happened to all those people.”

  “I find it depressing.”

  “Why?”

  “For one thing,
there’s never a happy ending. Everyone’s dead.”

  “There is that. Can you pass the butter?”

  “Anyway, to answer your question, with that many ancestors in your family tree, you are pretty much guaranteed that whatever century you pick, some of them used bushes and fields, and others got to, er—use the royal throne. One’s relatives do all sorts of things.”

  “I’ve just found out my alter is a chef. Odd,” I added.

  “Why?”

  “Exactly. Why did he become a chef? I’ve never wanted to be a chef. I suppose it means he has assistants.” The closest I had to assistants were Eggie and Rocky, who were responsible for the day-to-day operations at Wagner’s Kitchen and who had no hesitation in informing me (or even Wagner himself) what needed to be done, rather than vice versa.

  “It’s a myth that there is one ideal job for everyone—or one ideal mate, for that matter,” she assured me. “Those who were adults when the universes diverged, well, that was different. They had identical jobs and spouses and houses. No wonder people panicked and did stupid things. But you and Felix B, that’s another story. Look at our two worlds.”

  “They started out identical, that’s true.”

  “Well, almost. Anyway—accumulation of differences.”

  “One being that we A-dwellers use omnis for reading and here you have tr—paper books.”

  “We do use omnis for news stories and such, but not for anything that needs more than a few minutes’ worth of attention. I don’t know how you do it. I like to scribble notes in textbook margins. And my shelf hosts a P. G. Wodehouse collection.”

  “That’s like a whole tree right there, Bean.”

  “I know. But I started collecting them as a child—if we’d lived in Universe A, we wouldn’t have been able to afford an omni anyway.” She shrugged and reached for a shriveled grape, then changed her mind and left it on the plate. “Kitchen user guides here are your basic paper kind, by the way. We call them instruction manuals. Just text and a few pictures.”

  “Huh. The user guides I put together at Wagner’s Kitchen begin with a demonstration showing how the product is used; then I add example recipes for the customer to try out, culinary hints, witty anecdotes from the history of cooking…well, you get the idea. I once put together a seven-hour user guide for a pair of kitchen tweezers.”