Regarding Ducks and Universes

by Neve Maslakovic

  I took a look at the timeline displayed on Arni’s omni.

  Whereabouts of 4100B, 4101B, and 4102B on Y-day:

  8:59 breakfast paid at Big Fat Pancake

  10:30 Route 1 gas station

  11:15 Golden Gate Bridge parking lot receipt

  11:46:01 yabput

  13:05 lunch paid at Quake-n-Shake Restaurant

  “That’s it? That’s all we have?” I said.

  A fresh apple slice in hand, Arni shook his head. “Don’t listen to Bean, it’s a lot. Photo 13 coupled with the receipts puts you in the right place at the right time. Where precisely you were at 11:46:01, we don’t know yet. More photos or receipts would be helpful. Pak is still running recovery programs on the data from the computer in Monroe’s attic—that is, his laptop is, Pak is sleeping. There might be more there. Also, remember that this is just Felix B’s timeline.”

  “My parents’ Universe A computer no longer exists,” I reminded him. “The fire.”

  “But Universe A gas stations and restaurants keep records. Not much from Y-day was thrown out because everything from newspapers to milk cartons to stamps is a collector’s item. It’ll take a day or two to get authorization from DIM for the receipt from the Universe A Quake-n-Shake Restaurant, if there is a receipt to be had. In the meantime, we should go back to Monroe’s and see if we missed anything. I’d like to look through all the boxes in that attic, for one thing. Monroe claims they are his, but maybe there’s a box or two left by your parents—by Felix’s parents, I mean. I’ll make a call and get Professor Maximilian’s permission for another day here at Carmel and for some extra funds. I have a feeling Monroe is going to charge us for the privilege of searching his attic again.”

  “That reminds me,” I said. “I need to make a call.”

  I went into the hallway and dialed Wagner.

  “Felix,” bellowed Wagner, “there you are. Did you get my messages?”

  “Sorry, omni difficulties. I’m sending you the Golden Gate Bridge write-up.” I had put something together quickly.

  “The bread maker is coming along nicely. I’ve decided that it should be crimson, like the bridge itself, what do you think?”

  “Not a bad idea, though the bridge color is international orange.”

  “Is it? I’ve found a contact for the sourdough.”

  “Can’t do it, Wagner. I’m in Carmel.”

  “When you get back to the city, go to the Salt & Pepper Bakery in the Mission District. Mention my name. The rest is taken care of.”

  “Are we sure about this?”

  “It’s just a yeast culture. Besides, if I could do it the right way, I would.”

  “Well—all right. By the way, how did the pretzel competition go?”

  “A small disaster. The pretzels were too big for the ovens and stuck to the sides.”

  I went back into the Be Mine Inn breakfast room. “Bean, how did you know that our Wagners were the same?”

  She looked up from the cereal bowl. “I met him.”

  “Wagner? When?”

  “When I went looking for you at your workplace. In my clumsy attempt at approaching you as a research subject.”

  “Oh, you did quite well,” I said to her and took another slice of the weirdly shaped apple that Arni had peeled. It was very crisp.

  “Did I? I didn’t even have a plan. I walked into Wagner’s Kitchen with the vague notion of pretending to be a prospective client with an idea for a cookie maker I wanted to market. Luckily you had already left for your vacation, so I didn’t have to actually, um—lie.”

  “So you came into my office, Bean. What about James and Gabriella, did they engineer the pet bug scare just to secure some time with me? What is this? It’s delicious.”

  “It’s a papple. Pear-and-apple,” Arni said. He thought for a moment. “I wouldn’t have said that Past & Future operated that way. For one thing, they don’t need to. Money opens a lot of doors and they have it. On the other hand,” he added, “the way Photo 13 appeared out of nowhere made us proceed very carefully, and I imagine the same is true for them. Even after we’d made sure the photo was authentic, we’d planned to say nothing until we were confident you weren’t working for DIM.” He glanced pointedly across the table at Bean, who was studying the empty cereal bowl in front of her. “Anyway, here we all are, so I’m guessing you’re not a DIM agent and this isn’t an undercover operation of some sort to ferret out unauthorized research and other Regulation 19–breaking activities.”

  “I’m not and it isn’t.” Not only was I not a DIM agent, I was pretty sure my name was on a list titled Suspicious Persons produced by a desk-bound DIM official. Having a fake birth date will do that.

  Having left Pak, who had eventually shuffled downstairs, at the B&B to oversee further data recovery operations, the three of us headed back to Monroe’s house, on the way encountering a group of Passivists sitting still in a circle on a somewhat dry park lawn. One of them called out to us as the sidewalk took us past them, “We are all gods, my friends. Did one of you misuse the power? Did one of you build the dam that sent our two rivers cascading down different canyons—”

  “My parents were never like that,” Bean said quietly as we continued out of earshot. “They merely don’t like disturbing nature or making decisions.”

  “What do the Passivists mean, did one of us misuse the power?” I asked.

  “They believe the universe maker knowingly and deliberately sent A and B on different paths.”

  “They are not talking about Professor Z. Z. Singh, are they?”

  “No.” She picked up the pace.

  Monroe let us in and grudgingly allowed us access to his house again on the premise that if we found anything, anything at all, he would be paid accordingly. I had a feeling he had wanted to search the attic himself but was willing to let us do the job.

  As Jane darted into the hallway and we followed Monroe’s pet catmouse up the carpeted stairs, I said, “Felix’s parents also moved the family to San Francisco, you said. What about their life there? Was it similar?”

  Arni understood what I was asking. “Generally speaking. Differences between alters’ lives—and universes—tend to build up slowly. You end up with many small differences, a few medium-sized ones, and one or two biggies. Oddly, alters who are not in contact with each other often end up living lives more similar than those who are. If I had to guess, I’d say your parents and Felix B’s parents didn’t keep in touch, simply because they both moved back to Carmel and opened art galleries. If Felix B’s parents had told your parents about this great idea they had about opening a prehistoric art gallery, your parents would have found something else to do.”

  “By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask,” I said as we pushed the attic door open a second time, “how did Carmel get to keep its name in both universes? I thought you said only big cities kept their names.”

  “Ours is now Carmel Beach and yours is Carmel-by-the-Sea. As far as I can tell, everyone mostly calls both towns Carmel.”

  “Where do we start?” I said, looking around.

  It was a good question. Ignoring the musty furniture, the coat/umbrella rack in one corner, the upside-down refrigerator, and a couple of piles of knickknacks that were clearly more recent in origin, that left most of the room. Cardboard boxes lay stacked on top of each other, with no clues as to whether they were placed there before or after Monroe moved in.

  Bean pulled out the utility knife she had bravely borrowed from Franny’s cousin back at the B&B. “Let’s do this systematically. We’ll start by the door, each take a box, look through it, then move on around the room.”

  Arni pushed his long curls behind his ears and looked down ruefully at his pleated chinos. “I wish I’d worn an older pair.”

  “Do you even own any clothes that aren’t brand new?” Bean said and handed him the knife.

  The first few boxes turned out to be full of old garments, prompting more jokes about Arni’s sense of style.
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br />   “I’ll tell you what I wish,” I said, unable to suppress a shiver as I folded a box closed. (I had always found dated, worn-out clothing to be creepy.) “That we’d thought to bring some plastic gloves. Who knows what’s living in these? And what are we looking for anyway?”

  “Photo albums or a boxful of receipts, if we’re lucky.”

  We weren’t. A couple of hours and twenty-some boxes later, we were still empty-handed. We had unearthed some surprising things about Monroe’s past—who would have guessed that he played professional tennis abroad as a young man—but we hadn’t found anything belonging to my parents that wasn’t in the clothes or furniture category.

  “What about that box over there?” I stood up to stretch my legs, hoping my knees wouldn’t crack and asking the question so Bean wouldn’t notice if they did. She was jamming a utility knife into the refrigerator door. The door opened with a pop, revealing rows of jars, all upside down, some broken. “Ugh. Pickled vegetables. Did you say there was a box left, Felix?”

  “The microwave-sized one over there, behind the umbrella stand thingie.”

  “The what where?”

  I stepped over various hazards on the floor, pretending not to hear Arni explaining in a low voice, “A microwave oven is an appliance used to heat up food. Works on the principle of exciting water molecules via radio waves. Very popular in Universe A.”

  “I think I remember those from when I was a child,” I heard Bean say. “Whatever happened to them?”

  “People thought the radiation was dangerous. Plus we have self-heating cans nowadays.”

  “It’s marked BOOKS,” I said loudly.

  Bean closed the door on the refrigerator smell (which managed to permeate even my impaired nostrils) and they hurried over. Arni knelt down, wincing at the dusty stains on his chinos, and carefully slit the tape that sealed the box. He opened it to reveal, unsurprisingly, books. Bean lifted out a couple. “Hey, these are on art. They must have belonged to your—I mean, Felix’s—parents.”

  I took out a volume. It bore the title Stones, Tombs, and Gourds. “Why is it so bulky, this book?”

  “Looks like a museum publication,” Bean explained. “A textbook perhaps.”

  Inside the cover page, the textbook owner had written his initials: P.S., for Patrick Sayers, my father. At that moment I didn’t care that, technically, it was not my father’s hand that had set the letters down on the page, but his alter’s. I placed Stones, Tombs, and Gourds aside and we began carefully lifting out the rest of the box’s contents and looking through the books one by one. As Bean said, “You never know.” The books were all oversized, had durable covers, and spanned the range of prehistoric art, from cave paintings to megalithic monuments. It was a collection that represented both my parents’ education and their interests as they went about gathering life-size reproductions of ancient art for their own gallery (though not, of course, of the megalithic monuments).

  “I’ve always wondered about the first person who decided to make a sketch on the dank, dark wall of a cave,” said Arni, who was leafing through a book with glossy pictures of the Lascaux cave drawings. “You gotta ask, what prompted him or her to do it?”

  Bean put a book aside and lifted out another. “It wouldn’t surprise me to find that the first cave wall sketch started a really long event chain, one that led to, say, Professor Singh discovering inter-universe vortices.”

  I shook The History of Pigments: Volume I, but no conveniently hidden receipt or photograph fell out. “And what if these people had done something more constructive with their time than defacing cave walls, like hunting or berry picking?”

  “Maybe in that universe we’d still be berry picking.”

  “Ouch,” I said. “What the—”

  Bean looked over. “Paper cut. Watch out for those.”

  “You know,” Arni mused down his large nose, “it’s quite an evolutionary leap, to be able to create things that have no immediate practical use. Or to try anything new, for that matter. Who would have thought that sliding a bit of raw meat onto a stick and cooking it over a fire would yield something as delicious as steak? Just an example—I don’t eat meat anymore, I’m a pescetarian now,” he explained to me.

  “Wagner’s Kitchen markets a decent soy burger recipe,” I said, staring at my finger, the sting of the paper cut far out-scaling the size of it. I added, “Here’s what I don’t understand about this business of universe-making. I’m not sure how to phrase it, but—”

  “I know what you’re going to ask,” Bean said without looking up from The History of Pigments: Volume II.

  “Oh?”

  “People always ask the same question. You want to ask if your dog can start an event chain, though sometimes it’s about their favorite fish or hamster or whatever.”

  I felt a little deflated. “I was going to say duck.” For no reason at all, the orange-billed ducks frolicking in the health center pond had lingered in my mind. “If people can do it, why not ducks?”

  Bean looked thoughtful for a moment. “Do ducks,” she said quite seriously, “create universes?—Probably.”

  “Just like that? All the time? With every waddle?”

  “We think so, yes. With every waddle that sets off a nice long event chain, in any case.”

  I put the last of the books aside and peered into the now-empty box. “So how do we know that a duck didn’t—?”

  “We don’t. As a matter of fact, a duck would be just about the right size, I suppose. From Professor Singh’s old data we know that the warping of space-time that yielded A and B required a prime mover of small mass, around twenty-four libras. Anyone know what a typical duck size is?”

  Arni gave The History of Pigments: Volume III a final shake and stood up, clearly happy to be off the floor. He dusted off his hands and pants and reached for his omni. “I’ll check.”

  “A small-sized universe maker,” I said. “So that’s why you’re interested in me.”

  “Twenty-some libras is the typical weight of a six-month-old.”

  “Can a baby set off a significant chain of events?”

  “You ever been around one?” said Arni, nose deep in his omni.

  Bean had picked up Monroe’s catmouse and was absentmindedly stroking it. “It is limiting that people are the only observers we can interview. We have yet to figure out how to ask a whale or a tortoise if they saw anything of interest thirty-five years ago.”

  “So far,” interrupted Arni, reading from his omni, “I can tell you that your typical dinner duck is about ten libras, requiring at least two hours of roasting. Sounds appetizing for those who aren’t vegetarians, but a bit on the small side for our purpose.”

  “Forget ducks,” Bean said dejectedly, “we can’t even figure out where Felix was at the moment the Y-day yabput took place. Are you sure that you don’t have an old photo album sitting on a shelf somewhere at home, Felix?”

  “Sorry, no. Is it all right if I secretly hope a duck did it?”

  Arni flipped his omni shut. “Well, whoever it was, it certainly wasn’t me. I wasn’t born yet. Although I can’t guarantee that a few of my molecules weren’t part of the Y-day prime mover. We are all recycled, always shedding and taking in molecules, you know.”

  Monroe refused to let me leave with any books, insisting correctly that my A-ness prohibited me from being the rightful inheritor of any Universe B items and relented only when I pulled out my identicard and signed a chunk of my credit over to him.

  Pak was in the breakfast room of the B&B and had commandeered the long wooden table for his own purposes: on it sat the laptop, a printer, an empty teacup, a discarded banana skin, a plate with only crumbs on it—and half a dozen photographs strewn about.

  He looked at us inquiringly as we walked in. “Found anything at Monroe’s?”

  “Art books,” I said, placing my newly acquired treasure, Stones, Tombs, and Gourds, on the edge of the table, away from the teacup and the crumbs.

  “
The recovery program finished running. Took the whole night and most of the morning. It found photos.”

  I sat down.

  Arni gathered up the dirty dishes off the table and took them to the kitchen. He came back just as Pak said, rather rudely I thought, “Only a few are of interest to us. Five, to be exact. The resolution is not great—no, don’t touch them, Bean, they are still wet. I just printed them.”

  “When you say they are of interest,” I began weakly, “do you mean that they were, in fact—”

  “Taken on Y-day? Indeed.”

  I permitted my eyes to travel over the photographs.

  I don’t know what I expected to see.

  [14]

  FIVE PHOTOGRAPHS

  It’s impossible to imagine The Hound of the Baskervilles without the foggy and inhospitably barren English moor, or Murder on the Orient Express without the claustrophobic tension of the Istanbul-Calais train moving ever closer to its final station. Mood was important in a story. And in life. With Pak’s words, the mood in the room had heightened from academic interest to academic fever. “Five, you say,” Arni said, rubbing his hands together in anticipation.

  “I’ve ordered them by photo number,” Pak said of the items recovered from the Bitmaster.

  “I suppose it’s too much to hope there’s a time stamp as well,” Bean said, her eyes darting from one photo to another.

  “It is.”

  The first of the photos showed my mother next to the open door of a brown Chevrolet, either in the process of strapping me into my car seat or taking me out of it; in the background a store or restaurant could be seen. “The Big Fat Pancake,” Pak said. “Either right before breakfast or right after.”