Other Worlds Than These

by John Joseph Adams

  “Ah, Leonard. God help me, but you’re right.”

  “Call an exorcist.”

  “I’m a scientist! I don’t want it to go away! I want to understand it!”

  “So, Bêto, scientist, explain it to me. If it isn’t a ghost to be exorcised, what is it?”

  “A parallel world. No, listen, listen to me! Maybe in the empty spaces between atoms, or even the empty spaces within atoms, there are other atoms we can’t detect most of the time. An infinite number of them, some very close to ours, some very far. And suppose that when you enclose a space, and somebody in one of those infinite parallel universes encloses the same space, it can cause just the slightest bit of material overlap.”

  “You mean there’s something magic about boxes? Come on.”

  “You asked for possibilities! But if the landforms are similar, then the places where towns are built would be similar, too. The confluence of rivers. Harbors. Good farmland. People in many universes would be building towns in the same places. Houses. All it takes is one room that overlaps, and suddenly you get echoes between worlds. You get a single chair that exists in both worlds at once.”

  “What, somebody in our world goes and buys a chair and somebody in the other world happens to go and buy the same one on the same day?”

  “No. I moved into the house, that chair was already there. Haunted houses are always old, aren’t they? Old furniture. It’s been there long enough, undisturbed, for the chair to have spilled a little and exist in both worlds. So...you take the chair and put it on top of the door, and the people in the other world come home and find the chair has been moved—maybe they even saw it move—and he’s fed up, he’s furious, he smashes the chair.”

  “Ludicrous.”

  “Well, something happened, and you have the scar to prove it.”

  “And you have the chair fragments.”

  “Well, no.”

  “What! You threw them out?”

  “My best guess is that they threw them out. Or else, I don’t know, when the chair lost its structure, the echo faded. Anyway, the pieces are gone.”

  “No evidence. That clinches it. If you publish this I’ll deny it, Bêto.”

  “No you won’t.”

  “I will. I’ve already had my face damaged. I’m not going to let you shatter my career as well. Bêto, drop it!”

  “I can’t! This is too important! Science can’t continue to refuse to look at this and find out what’s really going on!”

  “Yes it can! Scientists regularly refuse to look at all kinds of things because it would be bad for their careers to see them! You know it’s true!”

  “Yes. I know it’s true. Scientists can be blind. But not me. And not you either, Leonard. When I publish this, I know you’ll tell the truth.”

  “If you publish this, I’ll know you’re crazy. So when people ask me, I’ll tell them the truth—that you’re crazy. The chair is gone now anyway. Chances are this will never happen again. In five years you’ll come to think of it as a weird hallucination.”

  “A weird hallucination that left you scarred for life.”

  “Go away, Bêto. Leave me alone.”

  2186

  “I call it the Angler, and using it is called Angling.”

  “It looks expensive.”

  “It is.”

  “Too expensive to sell it as a toy.”

  “It’s not for children anyway. Look, it’s expensive because it’s really high-tech, but that’s a plus, and the more popular it becomes, the more the per-unit cost will drop. We’ve studied the price point and we think we’re right on this.”

  “OK, fine, what does it do.”

  “I’ll show you. Put on this cap and—”

  ”I certainly will not! Not until you tell me what it does.”

  “Sure, I understand, no problem. What it does is, it puts you into someone else’s head.”

  “Oh, it’s just a Dreamer, those have been around for years, they had their vogue but—”

  “No, not a Dreamer. True, we do use the old Dreamer technology as the playback system, because why reinvent the wheel? We were able to license it for a song, so why not? But the thing that makes this special is this—the recording system.”

  “Recording?”

  “You know about slantspace, right?”

  “That’s all theoretical games.”

  “Not really just theoretical. I mean, it’s well known that our brains store memory in slantspace, right?”

  “Sure, yeah. I knew that.”

  “Well, see, here’s the thing. There’s an infinite number of different universes that have a lot of their matter coterminous with ours—”

  “Here it comes, engineer talk, we can’t sell engineering babble.”

  “There are people in these other worlds. Like ghosts. They wander around, and their memories are stored in our world.”

  “Where?”

  “Just sitting there in the air. Just a collection of angles. Wherever their head is, in our world and a lot of other parallel worlds, they have their memories stored as a pattern of slants. Haven’t you had the experience of walking into a room and then suddenly you can’t remember why you came in?”

  “I’m seventy years old, it happens all the time.”

  “It has nothing to do with being seventy. It happened when you were young, too. Only you’re more susceptible now, because your own brain has so much memory stored that it’s constantly accessing other slants. And sometimes, your head space passes through the head space of someone else in another world, and poof, your thoughts are confused—jammed, really—by theirs.”

  “My head just happens to pass through the space where the other guy’s head just happens to be?”

  “In an infinite series of universes, there are a lot of them where people about your height might be walking around. What makes it so rare is that most of them are using patterns of slants so different that they barely impinge on ours at all. And you have to be accessing memory right at that moment, too. Anyway, that’s not what matters—that is coincidence. But you set up this recorder here at about the height of a human being and turn it on, and as long as you don’t put it, say, on the thirtieth floor or the bottom of a lake or something, within a day you’ll have this thing filled up.”

  “With what?”

  “Up to twenty separate memory states. We could build it to hold a lot more, but it’s so easy to erase and replace that we figured twenty was enough and if people want more, we can sell peripherals, right? Anyway, you get these transitory brain states. Memories. And it’s the whole package, the complete mental state of another human being for one moment in time. Not a dream. Not fictionalized, you know? Those dreams, they were sketchy, haphazard, pretty meaningless. I mean, it’s boring to hear other people tell their dreams, how cool is it to actually have to sit through them? But with the Angler, you catch the whole fish. You’ve got to put it on, though, to know why it’s going to sell.”

  “And it’s nothing permanent.”

  “Well, it’s permanent in the sense that you’ll remember it, and it’ll be a pretty strong memory. But you know, you’ll want to remember it so that’s a good thing. It doesn’t damage anything, though, and that’s all that matters. I can try it on one of your employees first, though, if you want. Or I’ll put it on myself.”

  “No, I’ll do it. I’ll have to do it in the end before I’ll make the decision, so I might as well do it from the start. Put on the cap. And no, it’s not a toupee, if I were going to get a rug I’d choose a better one than this.”

  “All right, a snug fit, but that’s why we made it elastic.”

  “How long does it take?”

  “Objective time, only a fraction of a second. Subjectively, of course, well, you tell us. Ready?”

  “Sure. Give me a one, two, three, all right?”

  “I’ll do one, two, three, and then flip it like four. OK?”

  “Yeah yeah. Do it.”

  “One. Two. Three.” />
  “Ah...aaah. Oh.”

  “Give it a few seconds. Just relax. It’s pretty strong.”

  “You didn’t...how could this...I...”

  “It’s all right to cry. Don’t worry. First time, most people do.”

  “I was just...She’s just...I was a woman.”

  “Fifty-fifty chance.”

  “I never knew how it felt to... This should be illegal.”

  “Technically, it falls under the same laws as the Dreamer, so, you know, not for children and all that.”

  “I don’t know if I’d ever want to use it again. It’s so strong.”

  “Give yourself a few days to sort it out, and you’ll want it. You know you will.”

  “Yes. No, don’t try to push any paperwork on me right now, I’m not an idiot. I’m not signing anything while my head’s so...but...tomorrow. Come back tomorrow. Let me sleep on it.”

  “Of course. We couldn’t ask for anything more than that.”

  “Have you shown this to anyone else?”

  “You’re the biggest and the best. We came to you first.”

  “We’re talking exclusive, right?”

  “Well, as exclusive as our patents allow.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’ve patented every method we’ve thought of, but we think there are a lot of ways to record in slantspace. In fact, the real trouble is, the hardest thing is to design a record that doesn’t bend space on the other side. I mean, people’s heads won’t go through the recording field if the recorder itself is visible in their space! What I’m saying is, we’ll be exclusive until somebody finds another way to do it without infringing our patent. That’ll take years, of course, but...”

  “How many years?”

  “No faster than three, and probably longer. And we can tie them up in court longer still.”

  “Look at me, I’m still shaking. Can you play me the same memory?”

  “We could build a machine that would do that, but you won’t want to. The first time with each one is the best. Doing the same person twice can leave you a little...confused.”

  “Bring me the paperwork tomorrow for an exclusive for five years. We’ll launch with enough product to drop that price point from the start.”

  It took a month for the members of Kotoshi to assemble. Only a few decided not to go, and they took a vow of silence to protect those who were leaving They gathered at the southern tip of Manhattan, in the parlor of Moshe’s house. They had no belongings with them.

  “It’s one of the unfortunate side effects of the technology we use,” Moshe explained. “Nothing that is not organically connected to your bodies can make the transition to the new slant. As when you were born, you will be naked when you arrive. That’s why wholesale colonization using this technology is impractical—no tools. Nor can you transfer any kind of wealth or art. You come empty-handed.”

  “Is it cold there?”

  “The climate is different,” said Moshe. “You’ll arrive on the southern tip of Manhattan, and it will be winter, but there are no glaciers closer than Greenland. Anyway, you’ll arrive indoors. I live in this house and use it for transition because there is a coterminous room in the other angle. Nothing to fret about.”

  Hakira looked for the technology that would transfer them. Moshe had spoken of this room. Perhaps it was much larger than bender technology, and had been embedded in the walls of the room.

  Yet if they could not bring anything with them that wasn’t part of their bodies, Moshe’s people must have built their machinery here instead of importing it. Yet if they hadn’t brought wealth, how had Moshe obtained the money to buy this house, let alone manufacture their slant-changing machinery? Interesting puzzles.

  Of course, there were two obvious solutions. The first would be a disappointment, but it was the most predictable—that it was all fakery and Moshe would try to abscond with their money without having taken them anywhere at all. There was always the danger that part of the scam was killing those who were supposed to be transported so that there’d be no one left to complain. Foreseeing that, Hakira and the others were alert and prepared.

  The other possibility, though, was the one that made Hakira’s spine tingle. Theoretically, since slant-shifting had first been discovered as a natural function of the human brain, there was always the chance of non-mechanical transfer between angles. One of the main objections to this idea had always been that if it were possible, all the worlds should be getting constant visits from any that had learned how to transfer by mental power alone. The common answer to that was, How do you know they aren’t constantly visiting? Some even speculated that sightings of ghosts might well be of people coming or going. But Moshe’s warning about arriving nude would explain quite nicely why there hadn’t been more visits. It’s hard to be subtle about being nude in most human cultures.

  “Do any of you,” asked Moshe, “have any embedded metal or plastic in your bodies? This includes fillings in your teeth, but would also include metal plates or silicon joint replacements, heart pacemakers, non-tissue breast implants, and, of course, eyeglasses. I can assure you that as quickly as possible, all these items will be replaced, except for pacemakers, of course, if you have a pacemaker you’re simply not going.”

  “What happens if we do have some kind of implant?” asked one of the men.

  “Nothing painful. No wound. It simply doesn’t go with you. It remains here. The effect on you is as if it simply disappeared. And, of course, the objects would remain here, hanging in the air, and then fall to the ground—or the chair, since most of you will be sitting. But to tell the truth, that’s the least of my problems—part of your fee goes to cleaning up this room, since the contents of your bowels also remain behind.”

  Several people grimaced.

  “As I said, you’ll never notice, except you might feel a bit lighter and more vigorous. It’s like having the perfect enema. And, no matter how nervous you are, you won’t need to urinate for some time. Well now, are we ready? Anyone want to step outside after all?”

  No one left.

  “Well, this couldn’t be simpler. You must join hands, bare hands, skin to skin. Connect tightly, the whole circle, no one left out.”

  Hakira couldn’t help but chuckle.

  “Hakira is laughing,” said Moshe, “because he mockingly suggested that maybe our method of transfer was some kind of mumbo jumbo involving all joining hands. Well, he was right. Only this happens to be mumbo jumbo that works.”

  We’ll see, won’t we? thought Hakira.

  In moments, all their hands were joined.

  “Hold your hands up, so I can see,” said Moshe. “Good, good. All right. Absolute silence, please.”

  “A moment first,” said Hakira. To the others, he said softly, “Nippon, this year.”

  With fierce smiles or no expression at all, the others murmured in reply, “Fujiyama kotoshi.”

  It was done. Hakira turned to Moshe and nodded.

  They bowed their heads and made no sound, beyond the unavoidable sound of breathing. And an occasional sniffle—they had just come in from the cold.

  One man coughed. Several people glared at him. Others simply closed their eyes, meditating their way to silence.

  Hakira never took his eyes from Moshe, watching for some kind of signal to a hidden confederate, or perhaps for him to activate some machinery that might fill the room with poison gas. But...nothing.

  Two minutes. Three. Four.

  And then the room disappeared and a cold wind blew across forty naked bodies. They were in the open air inside a high fence, and around them in a circle stood men with swords.

  Swords.

  Everything was clear now.

  “Well,” said Moshe cheerfully, letting go and stepping back to join the armed men. One of them had a long coat for him, which he put on and wrapped around himself. “The transfer worked just as I told you it would—you’re naked, there was no machinery involved, and don’t you feel vi
gorous?”

  Neither Hakira nor any of the people of Kotoshi said a thing.

  “I did lie about a few things,” said Moshe. “You see, we stumbled upon what you call ‘slanting’ at a much more primitive stage in our technological development than you. And wherever we went that wasn’t downright fatal, and that wasn’t already fully inhabited, there you were! Already overpopulating every world we could find! We had come upon the technique too late. So, we’ve come recruiting. If we’re to have a chance at defeating you and your kind so we have a decent chance of finding worlds to expand into, we need to learn how to use your technology. How to use your weapons, how to disable your power system, how to make your ordinary citizens helpless. Since our technology is far behind yours, and we couldn’t carry technology from world to world anyway, the way you can, this was our only choice.”

  Still no one answered him.

  “You are taking this very calmly—good. The previous group was full of complainers, arguing with us and complaining about the weather even though it’s much colder this time. That first group was very valuable—we’ve learned many medical breakthroughs from them, for instance, and many people are learning how to drive cars and how to use credit and even the theory behind computer programming. But you—well, I know it’s a racial stereotype, but not only are you Japanese every bit as educated as the Jews from the previous group, you tend to be educated in mathematics and technology instead of medicine, law, and scripture. So from you we hope to learn many valuable things that will prepare us to take over one of your colonies and use it as a springboard to future conquest. Isn’t it nice to know how valuable and important you are?”

  One of the swordsmen let rip a string of sounds from another language. Moshe answered in the same language. “My friend comments that you seem to be taking this news extremely well.”

  “Only a few points of clarification are needed,” said Hakira. “You are, in fact, planning to keep us as slaves?”

  “Allies,” said Moshe. “Helpers. Teachers.”