Other Worlds Than These

by John Joseph Adams

  The barman steps back to better regard me. His bar is the width of a street.

  “I don’t know who you mean.”

  I introduce myself. “The music journalist? I have a column in Copa News.” Looks, head-shakes, shrugs. “I do a radio programme on Saturday afternoons. The history of MPB?”

  Kid in yellow throws his head back.

  “Just before Football Focus; I know you now. So you’re looking for the Dona.”

  “I’ve something I want to show her. Something the Seu left behind.”

  “I think I remember you now,” says the barman. “You did some interviews with her and his sisters. I saw them, they were good.” They all look at the emperor in white. He stubs out a cigarette.

  “You’ll find her where you found her last time,” he says.

  “It’s easy to get lost here,” says Kid Green “I’ll show you.” He casts off from the bar and leads by two steps behind through the labyrinth of alleys and tunnels. I’m sure I didn’t go this way before, I’m sure it was straighter, less shadowed. But the house are built and rebuilt and the streets change so often up here it’s as if they move themselves, in the night. We drill down into the roots of Vila Canoas, through a doorway skewed into a parallelogram and along a short concrete tunnel lined with television-lit windows. The sound of running water rushes around the corridor. We cross the buried stream that races down from São Conrado on a concrete culvert and climb a flight of steps towards the sun. It’s there that I hear the once-heard never-mistaken sound and turn to face the gun in Green Boy’s hand.

  “Look, I’m just a journalist.” I offer him my wallet, my cellular. My cards he knows will be biometriced, usable only to my touch but I give them to him anyway. I pray he won’t kidnap and march me to an ATM every day until I’ve emptied out my own account. Move slowly, withhold nothing and let them know they are in total control. I’ve been held up before. I know the drill.

  “What’s in the pocket?” Green waves his gun barrel.

  I think of denying, I think of lying but the square bulge of the drive betrays me. I take out the master disk carefully, between thumb and forefinger.

  “It’s only music.”

  “An iPod.”

  “No it’s a hard drive.”

  “An iPod, an MP4 player?”

  “It’s for Dona de Araujo. Seu Alejandro’s mother. It’s a present for her.”

  “An iPod,” Green Boy says again. He’s chewing his lip repeatedly now. That’s never good.

  “No it’s not an iPod.” I’m getting agitated. Give it to him. Give him whatever he wants. Get down on your knees and blow him if you need to. But it’s Pretty Petty Thieves.

  “Give me the fucking iPod!” Green screams.

  “It’s not a fucking iPod!” I scream back over the gurgle of buried water. I pull my hand back. He stabs forward with the gun. I see his finger close on the trigger.

  And I hear a click. A dead-gun click. Green Boy frowns. He stabs with the gun held sideways this time, pulls the trigger. I hear a click. Then another. Then another.

  THE CRISTÓBAL EFFECT

  SIMON McCAFFERY

  Simon McCaffery writes science fiction, horror, and hybrids of both genres, and has long been a fan of parallel worlds in fiction. His stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Black Static, Rocket Science, Tomorrow SF, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Mondo Zombie, Best New Werewolf Tales and other anthologies. He lives in Tulsa with his wife, three children, and a spoiled dachshund.

  All existence is a theft paid for by other existences; no life flowers except on a cemetery.—Remy de Gourmont

  “Eternity?... That is one hell of a movie.”—J. B. D.

  The wooden detour barricade is barely in place when I spot the car closing fast from the east. Just a glint of light against the desert hills, yet I know it is his car. I ignite the last flare and toss it onto the centerline of the lonely rural two-lane highway.

  Intersecting Highway 466 is an unpaved county road. Four miles west is a second, more infamous Y intersection: state route 41, near Cholame. In arid, remote Cholame, working men and ranchers are returning home in rattling pickups and dust-coated sedans like so many wind-blown tumbleweeds.

  The car’s mid-mounted 1.5 liter aluminum engine sings as it streaks toward me, gold rays of fading sunlight dancing along its sleek contours. It isn’t slowing. Does he think the detour signs and hissing flares are a mirage?

  The trained physicist in me recognizes the irony: If I stand still and die, I prove I’ve entered a malleable universe, a Wobbly-Brane. If not, he’ll swerve to miss me instead of the Ford Tudor driven by a Cal Poly student, and die of internal injuries as he does in all the rigid-event universes. Like the one in which you live.

  Tires shriek and the Porsche 550 Spyder slews to a stop a foot from my knees. I stare at its eternally youthful driver: the go-to-hell hair, high forehead, jutting chin and those cool baby-blues squinting at me behind tinted aviator glasses. I can hear my own heart pounding in my ears.

  The tiny car crouches only inches above the road. The driver and a darkhaired passenger stare up at me.

  “What’s the emergency here, friend?”

  “Detour,” I stutter, a B-actor suffering from stage fright.

  The driver turns down the blaring radio.

  “Say again?”

  “Detour,” I repeat. “Highway’s blocked off. Chemical truck tipped over and sprayed poison gas everywhere a mile from here. Heck of a mess.”

  The passenger is his racing mechanic, Rolf Wütherich. Dead from a 1981 auto accident after several failed suicide attempts, he grins. “Taking the back roads was a bad idea. The girls will be mad if we’re late.”

  The driver scrutinizes the truck parked on the opposite shoulder. The hand-painted letters on its flaking side read: MONTEREY COUNTY ROAD DEPT. Is he suspicious?

  “You fellows in a hurry to get someplace?”

  The driver cocks a finger. “Got a race to win up in Salinas tomorrow. Will that road get us back on the highway?”

  I nod, pointing with the flag. “It’ll take you a few miles out of your way, but not far. Go six miles and take the first right. It’s that or go back the way you came.”

  He removes his sunglasses and wipes road dust from the lenses on his white T-shirt. My mind records the tiny moon-shaped shaving cut along his chin; the way his hair curls back in carefree waves from his brow; the full, sensual lower lip, so like Brando’s.

  “Thanks for the warning, fellow. Try to stay out of the middle of the road.”

  He pops the race car named “Little Bastard” into gear and roars away into the twilight, the dry air whipping his hair, leaving a rooster tail of dust.

  I wait ten minutes in the hot ticking silence to make certain he doesn’t double back.

  Science fiction writers had it wrong. In rigid-event universes—an infinite paper-doll chain of Earths separated by a quantum frequency shift that only a Device can interpolate—a mysterious, immutable law binds everything down to the subatomic level of reality. Elasticity is limited. Visitors may alter only the most negligible of details. In an ordinary universe, no matter what story I fabricate he’ll get lost and return to find my barricade removed, and he’ll proceed to his fate. Or he’ll ignore the detour and roar past on the shoulder with a one-fingered salute. Or he’ll take Highway 1 north from L.A. to Salinas.

  In a Wobbly-B, phase space is unchained and events are malleable. We have a stiff, scientific acronym: Fluid-Event Branes.

  I load the signs into the truck bed and kick the guttering flares onto the shoulder, hastily burying them under sand. A deep chime sounds inside my mind.

  Hurry!

  A two-tone Ford sedan wheezes by from the west, a lanky bespectacled young man behind the wheel. Mr. Turnipseed, saved from a lifetime of notoriety. Half an hour later another Ford will pass this spot trailing the Spyder, a station wagon driven by photographer Sanford Roth, with fellow racer Bill Hickman riding shotgun.

 
; The sun, a fiery egg, slides behind the desert foothills. Soon people will shut their windows against the cold night air and the howl of coyotes prowling the Diablo Range like gray ghosts. And in the morning, James Byron Dean will stumble out of bed in a Salinas bungalow, his hair corkscrewed from sleep and his eyes sporting the dark bags immortalized in LIFE.

  Alive and ready to race on the first day of October, 1955.

  “Brane-slicer” contraband, case D-T 5154:

  SHIPWRECKED (1957). JAMES DEAN, RITA HAYWORTH, JAMES GARNER, ROBERT WAGNER. WWII rebel James Dean and a strong supporting cast battle Japanese soldiers on a balmy pacific atoll. Directed by GEORGE STEVENS, Warner Bros., color, 137 minutes. First-generation 35mm Technicolor print.

  Final Bid: $268M US

  [bidder identity redacted pending prosecution]

  CONTENTS OF THIS INVESTIGATION ARE CLASSIFIED by order of Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and Department of Defense / DARPA-TUNNEL

  It isn’t time travel. Please keep that firmly in mind.

  Traveling to the past inside one’s home universe is impossible. Traveling to a precise multiverse spacetime coordinate inside an adjacent reality is possible, if you possess a Device. Their inventor remains unknown. The trip utterly destroys every atom in your body, but a new copy of you arrives safely on the other side.

  It’s best if you don’t think about that part.

  My identity was erased after I stole a Device and deserted my job as a military physicist, but we’ll use one of the aliases I take to deal with my carefully selected, extremely wealthy clients: Jason Blackstone, brane slicer. That’s the slang term for outlaws like me.

  Finding Jimmy in this 1956 isn’t difficult.

  The scene is the Villa Capri, Jimmy’s favorite Hollywood bar. It’s a popular hangout for stars, including the sexually indeterminate and closeted gay actors. I spot Anthony Perkins, buxom Terry Moore, bronzed Tab Hunter and an incredibly youthful Dennis Hopper. They stop at Jimmy’s table to pay their respects. Rebel has opened and teenagers are flocking to theaters. George Stevens is trying to edit Giant down to two-hundred minutes to meet an August release, two months early, because he doesn’t need to secretly hire Nick Adams to dub Jimmy’s muffled, drunken lines in the last-supper scene.

  From my bar stool I make eye contact.

  I’ve replaced the filthy overalls and dust with slacks and an open-throated shirt, dark hair combed back. No flicker of recognition.

  Brooding is Jimmy’s specialty, so I step to his table and buy him a drink. He stops fooling with those bongos he carries everywhere. He has bags under his eyes and is dressed in the rig that so infuriated the studio heads until they realized its marketing potential—scuffed boots, T-shirt, faded jeans and a dirty leather jacket.

  My face is familiar but he hasn’t made the connection. We drink and talk about the races and the new Triumph 650cc Tiger motorcycle.

  In his nearby bungalow he falls asleep as I rattle on about classic films and performances. He would often fall sound asleep in restaurants during conversations. When he finally stirs, I recount our meeting on the road to Cholame and Paso Robles. His face hardens in a mask of suspicion. If a ten-gallon hat were pushed back on his head, the image of Jett Rink, the angry, loveless cowboy, would be complete. He glances at my bare forearms, looking for the needle marks of a heroin addict.

  “You’re from the future and I’m a ghost.”

  “It’s a lot to process.”

  He laughs. “So is Eisenhower going to be re-elected? When are the Reds gonna drop an atom bomb on New York?”

  I’m not about to discuss a technology that shifts a conscious organism through the multiverse, burrowing through infinite branes, if you’ll excuse the morbid turn of phrase. The time-travel hokum works best.

  Jimmy stabs out his cigarette and vaults up from the sofa. He smiles, exhaling smoke from both nostrils.

  “You’re a fruitcake.”

  I stay seated, keeping my voice low and even.

  “Jimmy, you should at least hear what I have to say.”

  He slips on the black leather jacket over the crumpled T-shirt and is instantly transformed into Jim Stark, the volatile middle-class rebel with smoldering eyes.

  “I think you better hit the road.”

  I do as he says, but pause at the door.

  “Your first dog, Tuck, used to piss all over your Aunt Ortense’s back porch in the winter, next to that little black potbelly stove. Stunk like hell. Your favorite ice cream is coffee and raspberry mixed together. Revolting. Your favorite book is The Little Prince. Favorite poet: James Whitcomb Riley. Favorite waiter in New York: Louie de Liso at Jerry’s Bar and Restaurant. Louie used to serve you plates of spaghetti on the house when your money ran out between jobs—”

  Jimmy doesn’t blink. “Anybody could have dug all that up with a PI.”

  “And the detour near Cholame?”

  His eyes narrow. “I’ve done lots of work on television. You recognized me. I just can’t see what your angle is.”

  “Lola Barnes.”

  That gets an instant reaction.

  “She seduced you after the Sadie Hawkins dance your senior year in high school and you sweated until you were certain she wasn’t pregnant.”

  He opens his mouth to reply, but I interrupt him in my omnipotent, time-traveler-knows-all voice.

  “I’ve studied your entire life, Jimmy. Right up until the end.”

  Stark is gone. He looks like a kid jarred awake from a nightmare only to discover that it has crawled out from under the bed.

  “It was a near head-on collision with a 1950 Ford sedan driven by a kid named Donald Turnipseed,” I continue. “You weren’t traveling twice the speed limit as people reported for years, but you weren’t wearing a seat belt. Rolf was thrown clear, but you were declared dead in the ambulance on the way to the hospital in Paso Robles at 5:59 Pacific Time.”

  He runs a hand wildly through his hair. “This is nuts.”

  “Would I make up a name like Turnipseed?”

  “Next you’ll tell me you ride around in one of those flying saucers,” he says in a sulky tone.

  Jung was right: flying saucers are a manifestation of our collective fears in an epoch in which mankind’s own creations are more horrifying than any brimstone Underworld. But parallel universes, which precede early Hindu mythology, are quite real.

  This jaunt has almost expired.

  “I protect unique, lost works of art, like twentieth-century motion pictures.”

  “So why me? I’m a nobody.”

  This is the hook, and the only undeniable truth.

  “You’re one of the greatest actors of your generation, and three films wasn’t enough. You’ll have the opportunity to develop your craft and not be pigeonholed as the bad-boy rebel. Isn’t that what you’ve dreamed of since you raised sheep on your uncle’s farm?”

  Disbelief and desperate hope collide in his eyes like a stormfront.

  “What if I decide to never step in front of a camera again?” He crosses his arms, dips his chin. That willful petulance—

  I smile. “Jimmy, it’s your life and future. Except with one possible caveat.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “When I saved your life, I created a small fracture in reality. Like a fault line.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “If you move back to Indiana and become a dentist, events could snap back like a rubber band.”

  “You mean—”

  His enigmatic mother, Mildred Dean, succumbed to ovarian cancer when he was nine. She has haunted his life. Jimmy’s greatest anxiety is the specter of death, and he instinctively rejected the afterlife espoused by his aunt and uncle. That’s the lever I use.

  “You’ll die, Jimmy. Like you were meant to.”

  “Brane slicer” contraband, case D-T 2756

  Diana: My Story (2017). Autobiography of the former Princess of Wales chronicling her privileged childhood, education, life before and after Prin
ce Charles, motherhood, her second and third marriages, a failed 2008 suicide attempt, and her re-dedication to charitable work. Random House, 398 pages. Stated first edition. Signed by the author.

  Bid: $71M EUR [convicted bidder identity redacted]

  In 1974 an Air Force corporal named Pete Moss (no more a joke name than Turnipseed) found a small transistor radio that wasn’t a radio. It was constructed using highly advanced fabrication technologies, unrecognizable at the time. A Device’s invisible skin resembles graphene, incredibly strong layers of carbon arranged in a hexagon honeycomb lattice an atom thick. Inside there are no solid-state circuits or chips. Instead, intricate networks of nano-machines and quantum computers the size of large molecules link with other Devices across universes using an entanglement codec like a cosmic GPS unit, calibrating frequency shifts and navigation. Devices aren’t solid objects in the conventional sense and they easily take the form of ordinary items, chromatic surface particles coordinating to mimic a pack of cigarettes or a smartphone.

  Moss’s discovery lay forgotten in Pentagon storage for forty-five years until a brilliant young DARPA analyst named Dick Jenks activated it. More on Jenks later.

  DARPA-Tunnel physicists failed to reverse-engineer the Devices, but they uncovered a wholly unexpected view of existence: that endless paper-doll chain of Earths characterized by a puzzling dominant sameness. All those stories we loved of snuffing out Hitler or arming the Rebs with machine guns or stopping Oswald from murdering JFK—hopeless.

  And the Devices impose three primary restrictions. Considering that we’re still homicidal primates, I think that’s fortunate, don’t you?

  You cannot visit a future coordinate on another Earth. Maybe this is a fundamental law of travel of the multiverse, or maybe it’s a governor function.

  Second, you can never revisit the same coordinate in the same universe.

  Third, you always arrive on Earth. The Devices don’t double as transdimensional portals to Altair IV or exo-planets like Gliese 581g. A Tunnel sub-team is exploring this possibility: a cornucopian New World of raw material would vault America back to superpower status. If there’s an indigenous population, well, I think of Chris Columbus, and shudder.