Yuan sits up weakly, finds the cooling yak butter tea by the bedside, and takes a sip. He is bewildered. Why is the monk so upset?
Later the monk returns.
“Since the third day you came here,” he says, “you haven’t had a fever. Once your strength returns, you should go back, down into the world. You have things to do there.”
Yuan is incredulous.
“Even if what you say is true,” he says after a while, with some bitterness, “how can I trust myself? My vision of this place—remember? The university I dreamed of—the hope of the world. My reason to keep going. It was all false.”
“Maybe it was a vision of the future,” the monk says gently. “After all, your teacher was real. If she mentioned this place to you, then that must mean that others are dreaming the same dream. Go back down. Do your work. This malady, I think it is nothing but what everyone down there has. Most of the time they don’t even know it.”
He gestures savagely toward the world below and falls silent.
Yuan has not allowed himself to feel hope for so long that at first he doesn’t recognize the feeling. But it rises within him, an effervescence. He looks at the monk’s averted face, the way the animal on his shoulder nestles down.
“If I am cured, then you have saved my life. You took me in and nursed me back to health. The kindness of strangers. I am twice blessed.”
The monk shakes his head. He goes out of the room to attend to their next meal.
As Yuan’s condition improves, he begins to explore the ruined monastery. There are rooms and rooms in the east wing that are still intact. The meltwater from the avalanche has filled the lower chambers of the west wing. In that dark lake there are splashes of sunlight under the holes in the roof.
“We got all the bodies out,” the monk says.
Then one afternoon, when he is exhausted from exploring and has taken to his bed, Yuan is woken by the monk’s little pet. The animal is scrabbling frantically at Yuan’s shoulder, whimpering. Sitting up, Yuan looks around for the monk, but there is no sign of him. There is a great, deep rumble that appears to come from the Earth itself.
At first Yuan thinks there is an earthquake, because the mountain is shaking. Then he realizes what it is. He rushes out of the room, conscious of the little creature’s scampering feet on the stone floor behind him. He runs up the stone stairway to the broken terrace that lies directly in the glacier’s path.
The monk is standing on the terrace, gazing upward, his black robes billowing behind him. The enormous boulder that was poised at the lip of the glacier has loosened and is thundering down the mountainside, gathering snow and rocks with it.
“What are you doing?” Yuan yells, grabbing the man. “Get away from here—you’ll be killed!”
He grabs the man’s robe near the throat, shakes him. The monk’s eyes are wild. With great difficulty Yuan pulls him across the shaking, broken terrace floor, toward the stairs.
“You die here, I die here too!” he yells.
At last they are half falling down the steps, running down the broken corridors, over to the east wing. When they get to the terrace, there is a sound like an explosion, and the ground shakes. It seems to Yuan that the whole monastery is going to go down, but after what seems like a long, endless moment, the shaking stops. They look around and see that the east wing is still standing. The small creature leaps up the monk’s robe and trembles on his shoulder. The monk caresses it.
There are tears in his eyes, making tracks down the lined face. Yuan sits him down on the low wooden seat. The kettle has fallen over. He brings water from the great stone jar, pours some into the kettle, gets the fire going.
When the first cup of tea has been made and drunk, when the monk has stopped shaking, he starts to speak:
“I’m not a monk. I’m only the caretaker. They took me in when I came in as sick as you, but where the world made you feel like you would die of grief, it made me burn with anger. I was a city man, living what I thought was the only way to live, the good life. Then some things happened and my life unraveled. I lost everything, everyone. I ran away up here so that I wouldn’t hear the voices in my head. I was full of anger and pain. My sickness would have killed me if the monks hadn’t calmed it, slowed me down. Instead thirty-three of them died when the avalanche came—my teacher among them. And I lived.”
“So you were waiting for that last rock to come down,” Yuan says slowly, “so you’d have your death.”
The man starts to say something, but his eyes fill with tears, and he wipes them with the back of his hand. The creature on his shoulder chitters in agitation.
“Your little animal needs you to live,” Yuan says. “He came and called me. That is why you are alive.”
The man is holding the animal against his cheek as the tears flow.
“Life is a gift,” Yuan says. “You gave me mine, I gave you yours. That means we are bound by a mutual debt, the kind you can’t cancel out. Come back with me when I return.”
Several days later, much recovered, Yuan made his way back the way he had come. His companion had decided to stay in the village nearest the monastery. Here, under a sky studded with stars, Yuan heard the man’s story. Yuan left with him an orange wristlet, even though the satellite connection was intermittent here. When they parted, it was with the expectation of meeting again.
“In the future that you dreamed of,” said his friend. “Don’t be too long!”
“I’ll be back before you know it,” Yuan said.
After he had passed through the high mountain desert, Yuan descended into the broad alpine meadow. He lay down in the deep, rich grass and felt his weight, the gentle tug of gravity tethering him to the earth. Around him the streams sang in their watery dialect. Sleep came to him then, and dreams, but they weren’t about death. His wristlet pinged, and he woke up. He must be back in satellite range. He heard, faintly, music, and the sound of a celebration. A woman’s voice spoke to him, a young voice, excited. Two words.
“… A BUTTERFLY…”
White Curtain
PAVEL AMNUEL, TRANSLATED BY ANATOLY BELILOVSKY
“White Curtain” first appeared in Russian in Kiev in 2007, and was published in F&SF for the first time in English in 2014, translated by Anatoly Belilovsky. It plays in an intelligent, elegant way with the existence of myriad alternate-possibility worlds, and a man who can select between them—at a cost.
Pavel Amnuel is an astrophysicist and author of speculative fiction written in Russian. He was born in 1944, in Baku (then part of the Soviet Union, now Azerbaijan), earned a doctorate in astrophysics, and for many years studied terminal events in stellar evolution—neutron stars and black holes. In 1968, in a paper written with O. Guseynov, he predicted X-ray pulsars, discovered several years later by NASA’s Uhuru satellite. He also participated in the creation of the complete catalog of X-ray sources known in the 1970s. His first SF story was published in 1959 in Russia, followed by his collected works in 1984. He repatriated to Israel in 1990, working at Tel Aviv University while simultaneously serving as editor in chief of several newspapers and magazines (including Aleph and Vremya) and writing novels, essays, and short fiction. He has won multiple Soviet and Russian awards including, in 2012, the Aelita, equivalent to the Anglophone Hugo. “White Curtain” is one of a series of stories dealing with the multiverse that includes as-yet-untranslated novellas “Branches,” “Facets,” “What Is There Behind this Door?” and “Seeing Eye,” and stories such as “Green Leaf,” “Blue Alcior,” and “Seagull.”
Anatoly Belilovsky is a Russian American author and translator of speculative fiction. His work has appeared in the Unidentified Funny Objects anthology, Ideomancer, Nature, F&SF, Stupefying Stories, The Immersion Book of Steampunk, Daily Science Fiction, Kasma SF, Kazka, and has been podcast by Cast of Wonders, Tales of Old, and Toasted Cake. He was born in a city that went through six or seven owners in the last century, all of whom used it to do a lot more than drive to church on Sundays; he is old eno
ugh to remember tanks rolling through it on their way to Czechoslovakia in 1968. After being traded to the United States for a shipload of grain and a defector to be named later (see the Jackson-Vanik amendment), he learned English from Star Trek reruns and went on to become a pediatrician in an area of New York where English is only the fourth most commonly used language. He has neither cats nor dogs, but was admitted into the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America in spite of this deficiency.
I recognized him immediately, though we had not seen each other for eleven years, having last met under very different circumstances. There was a change in him: he looked older, yet, somehow, better.
“Hello, Oleg,” I said.
“Hello, Dima,” he answered as if we had spent the day before as we used to, in years past, drinking and arguing about the cascading splice theory. “I knew you’d come. Sit. No, not on this chair, that’s for visitors. Sit here, on the sofa.”
I sat down, and the sofa squeaked in protest.
“Of course you knew,” I said. “You are the prophet.”
“I’m no prophet,” he said sadly. “Who knows that better than you?” He spoke more slowly than ever before, enunciating each word to the last syllable.
“Yes,” I said, not trying to hide the sarcasm. “Who better?”
“How did you find me?” Oleg asked.
“With difficulty,” I admitted. “But I found you. You were—”
“No matter,” he interrupted, “it does not matter at all, what I used to be. Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you come? I don’t think you came just to make sure it’s me. You want something from me. Everyone does. Success? Luck?”
If there was irony in his voice, I did not notice it. I did not need luck. Especially not from him.
“Irina died last year,” I said, looking in his eyes. “We had been together for ten years, two months and sixteen days.”
He turned away from me to look at the curtained window. What did he see in that blank screen, that white expanse where all the colors of his life were mixed together? Himself, young, walking Irina to a discotheque? Or only Irina, on that long-ago day when yet another dazzling presentation he made at that morning’s seminar inspired him to believe himself irresistible to women? The day I watched, from the auditorium door, as he proposed to her with this new-found confidence, as she kissed the corner of his mouth and said that he’s a little late because she loves another, and cast an eloquent glance in my direction, and he followed it, and understood. The day Irina and I left him behind, defeated and deflated, useless even to himself.
The day I saw him for the last time, until now. On the following morning Oleg Larionov, previously a promising theoretical physicist, submitted his letter of resignation. The dean, though loath to lose him, would have eventually allowed him to leave on good terms (he stamped the letter with “Approved at the end of semester”), but Oleg left without waiting for the response. He left without saying good-bye to anyone. He had been seen boarding the Forty Three bus in the direction of the train station; except for that, no one had even an inkling of where he was going.
And that was all.
“Why did she die?” Oleg asked, his gaze still on the white screen-like curtain. Why did you not save her? was what I heard.
I could not. I could do nothing. My strength was in theoretical work, I excelled at splice calculations, perhaps not all, but up to a very high complexity, up to twelve branches of reality, that’s quite a lot, almost unheard-of for an analytical solution—but in reality there was nothing I could do. Irina fell ill unexpectedly, and died soon after. How soon? She was diagnosed in March, and in July she was gone.
“Brain tumor,” I said. “Could not have been predicted. There wasn’t a nexus of branching—”
“Theoretically,” he interrupted, and I could not decide if his words mocked mine, or were a simple statement of fact.
“I’ve been looking for you for an entire year,” I said. “And found you. As you can see. Do you remember Gennady Bortman?”
Oleg turned toward me at last. I had expected something in his gaze, a feeling, anything. But there was nothing. He looked at me as calmly as a doctor at a patient suffering from a cold.
“I do remember him,” said Oleg. “It’s a pity.”
“He stayed on the branch,” I said, “which you predicted for him. Was there anything he could have done?”
So much depended on Oleg’s answer. I did not want to think about my life. But Ira’s …
“Dima,” said Oleg and rubbed his hands together, an old familiar gesture with which he once rubbed chalk dust off his hands after a long presentation, adding it to the floor already littered with chalk crumbs. “Dima, he could have chosen any branch in his reality. The months he had until … Of hundreds of decisions, you understand, each time a new branch grew, but always in the direction…”
“In our reality,” I interrupted, “only your prophesy could come true. Your branch was stronger, more resilient.”
“Yes.” Oleg nodded. “My branch had higher probability, a million times higher.”
“In other words,” I said, and it was important for me to be clear, so very important that I searched for Oleg for a year, an excruciating year of living on memories, “in other words, for a million possibilities you choose, there may be one chance for someone else’s choice?”
“Maybe not a million,” he said, still rubbing his fingers, his gesture irritating me so much that I fought the urge to slap his hands. “Maybe ten million. Maybe a hundred billion. There is no way to measure, no statistics.”
“You’ve had years to compile statistics,” I said. “You set yourself up as a prophet to compile statistics, don’t try to tell me you didn’t! For God’s sake, don’t tell me you are disillusioned with pure science and became a practising prophet only to help people!”
“I do help them—”
“Some of them! Oleg, I’ve hung around here for a week, I listen to people waiting for their turn, some for six months, they come every day, they wait and walk away and come back, and once in a while one of your secretaries will come out and say, “He won’t see you, sorry,” and it’s no use arguing back. And some, people you pick out from the crowd, you’ll see them right away, only them, predict a happy, creative life with luck in business and personal fulfillment.”
“Have I been wrong?”
“Never! You are one hundred percent reliable! This means you choose the necessary branch of the multiverse with an accuracy of at least ten sigmas!”
“Eight sigmas,” he corrected. “I have compiled enough records for eight sigmas, I need another three years—”
“The hell with that,” I said. “I looked for you so that—”
“It is impossible, Dima.” Oleg stopped rubbing nonexistent chalk off his fingers, put his hands on his knees and looked me in the eyes. “You know it’s impossible. You were the one who proved the theorem, according to which—”
“Yes.” I nodded. “I proved it. If in Branch N of the multiverse the world-line of object A is a segment of length L, this line cannot be extended within its branch by grafting it to other realities.”
“You proved it. And what do you want from me now, Dima? Ira does not exist in this here-and-now. You could not keep her.”
“I could not—”
“You could not hold on to her,” Oleg repeated. “And what is it to us that our Irisha—”
He said “our.” He still lived with the feeling that she had only temporarily left him for another, and would come back.
“Our Irisha is still alive in a billion other branches of the multiverse?”
“You could,” I said. “You are a genius at splicing. You can tie branches together and graft them, like Michurin grafted an apple branch to a pear tree.”
“And how did it end?” Oleg chuckled. “Michurin, Burbank. Lysenko.”
“Won’t you even try!” I yelled.
Oleg stood up and walked to
ward the window, as if to put as much distance between us as possible, as if my presence made it hard for him to breathe, to think, to live.
“I tried. All the time, I tried,” he said, his voice as hollow as if he spoke under water.
“You…” I mumbled in confusion. He could not have known about Ira.
“I can do nothing for myself, you see? Think, Dima, you are one hell of a theoretician. If I am in Branch N, then all possible splices that can change my fate—”
“Are bound by the causality of that branch, yes, I proved that in my third year of study,” I said. “But you said that you tried—”
“I couldn’t avoid trying. What if the theory were wrong?”
We sat in silence, each thinking about what had been said.
“How did you know about Ira?”
Oleg turned and looked at me with a silent accusation.
“Well, Dima, if you found me … You didn’t have to look for me, I checked the university web page every day, I knew about everything that went on. I could not stand not knowing.”
“That never entered my mind,” I muttered. “I would have figured out where you are, long ago.”
“I doubt it,” he said. “I took measures. When Ira died, the Alumni Association ran an obituary the same day. I tried, right there and then. God, Dima, I leaped from branch to branch like a neurotic monkey, sliced more realities than I had ever allowed myself before—and, after that, never again.
“I didn’t—”
“Of course you didn’t feel a thing!”
“Sorry,” I said. “I am not myself today. Stupid; I should have known, I could not feel a break, my reality was contiguous with my past.”
“You had hundreds of realities, and in all of them Ira died, and I was always late, I made it to the funeral in one hundred and seventy-six branches.”
“You went to a hundred seventy-six funerals?” I said, horrified.
He didn’t say anything, and I understood why he looked so old to me. I would have gone mad in his place.
“Then,” I said, “there was nothing—”
The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection Page 50
