Master of Space and Time (23 page)

“There's a buffet inside,” he called to us. “Help yourself. I'll make out the bill later.”

“Are you hungry?” I asked Nancy.

She nodded and sat down at one of the sunny tables. I went into the café and filled two plates. I brought them out and then fetched some white wine and soda.

We ate in silence for a minute. It was the best
food I'd ever tasted. One of the things on my plate was a crisp white veal sausage. I held it up for Nancy to see, remembering the fable.

She laughed and patted my hand. “You see, Joe? It's not so bad to ask for simple things.”

“Do you know what each person wished?”

“No, not anymore. While I was blunzed I knew, sort of. I sent my echowomen everywhere, like Alwin said I should. I made the Planck length big enough to cover the whole Earth, and I helped everyone make his or her wish.”

“Do people know it was you? You'll be treated like a queen!”

“No, no. You know how small most of the echoes are. People couldn't see me. And I wouldn't
want
them to know it was me, because then they'd ask me to do it again.”

“Yeah. And we can't do it again. There's only three colors of gluon, and each color only works once.” An attractive young couple floated down out of the sky to sit at a table nearby. Glancing up, I could see a number of people flying around overhead. The power of flight seemed to be a fairly common wish.

“I wonder what Harry wished for,” I mused. “Do you know?”

“I meant to check, but he was already gone by the time I got to him. He was like you—he knew right away he'd been blunzed, and he acted on it.”

“He wasn't in Rahway anymore?”

“He left our space, so far as I could tell. Look at those two!”

Another couple had joined the crowd at the café—a beautiful red-haired woman and a man
who was only three inches high. The man was perched in the redhead's décolletage like a prince on a balcony. It looked like a good place to be.

More and more people were out in the street now, everyone chattering and looking around to see what the others had done. There were many more beautiful men and women than was normal for New Brunswick; beauty was obviously a wish even more popular than flight. Lots of people wore jewels as well, and I noticed several men drawing out big wads of cash.

“All my money's going to be worthless,” I suddenly realized. “Everybody and his brother must have asked for a million dollars.”

“Yes,” said Nancy. “But we've still got our penthouse.”

“But what are we going to live on? I can't go back to working at Softech.”

“Go back in business with Harry,” suggested Nancy. “If you can find him.”

“Yeah, that's a thought.” I was distracted again by a passerby, this one a man running at what must have been thirty miles per hour. “Look at that guy go!”

“A lot of beauties, a lot of millionaires, a lot of great athletes,” said Nancy. “Can I have some more wine, please?”

A giant breast rolled past, followed by a man with four arms. Shiny cars—antique and futuristic alike—buzzed this way and that. In a doorway across the street lay a man slumped in some interminable ecstasy. In the distance I heard music playing.

“How about Alwin Bitter? What did he wish for?”

Nancy's eyes danced above her tilted wineglass. “Alwin—Alwin is an altruist,” she said, setting down her glass. “He wished for this all to happen.”

“But the blunzer made itself. It was a cause-and-effect loop with Harry and me in it.”

“Even so, you and Harry and the loop had to come from somewhere. Alwin wished you into existence.”

“I don't believe that, Nancy, do you?”

“I don't know. What's important is that now everyone will be happy for quite a while, and maybe later—even if the changes all wear off—people will still remember how to be happy. I thought it was worth a try.”

A machine that seemed to be a flying saucer zipped down the street and hovered by our cafe. A hatch opened and family of little green “Martians” hopped out. They talked with New Jersey accents.

“This sure is fun, Nancy. Did you happen to notice what Serena wished for?”

“A pet rabbit and a box of candy.”

“Sweet. Maybe we better fly down to Princeton and pick her up. You can still fly, can't you?”

“Sure. You'll feel better to me with all that girl fat gone.” Nancy reached under the table and squeezed my thigh. I drank a little more wine and smiled at her. Everyone in sight looked happy. It was like some magic Christmas party.

I waved the café owner over for the check. “How much?”

“I dunno. You got a lot of money, don't you?”

“Sure. Here, take a hundred.” I fished the bill out of the purse I'd been using and handed it over.

The café owner looked at the bill with a frown. “Is this real?”

“Was the food?” I countered.

“Okay, a hundred,” grumbled the owner. “But I don't like it. Why didn't
I
think of asking for money instead of a new restaurant?”

“You're better off with the restaurant,” I assured him. “There's going to be inflation like you won't believe.” The whole financial system was going to have to be reworked. It was going to be a mess. People wouldn't stay happy for long. The café owner stomped off to the lovers from the sky and charged them a cool grand for two cups of coffee. “Maybe you should have tried to change human nature,” I told Nancy as we stood up. “Make people nicer and more generous.”

“Some people did wish that for themselves,” Nancy responded. “There'll be a lot of saints around.”

A man in the shape of a motorcycle went zooming past with a fur-covered woman on his saddle. Glancing after them, I noticed a building made entirely of meat: a skin-covered orifice building with people plunging in and out of its portals. I was beginning to wish for a less frantic scene.

“Well, come on, Nancy, lie down and—”

Two hands suddenly appeared in front of me. Familiar-looking hands. They grabbed me by the shoulders and yanked me into the unknown.

Y
OU
could say that everything went black, or you could say that everything went white. I was . . . elsewhere.

But not alone.

“Hey, Fletcher,” came the familiar voice, “you have to help me.”

“Harry? Where are we?”

“Superspace, naturally.”

“What's superspace?” I felt around for my body and couldn't find it.

“Thoughtland, Fletch, the cosmos. Pure mentation. Abstract possibility. Infinite dimensions. The class of all sets. God's mind. The pre-geometric substratum. Hilbert space. Penultimate reality. White . . .”

“Cut the crap, Harry. I was having a good time till you butted in. Put me back.”

“You don't want to rush back there. This is much cooler. This is eternity, Joe, this is the secret of life.”

“Oh come on, Harry. I'm not interested in the secret of life. I just want to go home and be with Nancy. She and Sondra are going to be at Alwin Bitter's.”

“Hold it.” Contrasts appeared in the black-or-white void around me. Streamers, clumps, hazy patches. “Can you see it now?”

“I can't see anything. I might as well be looking at clouds.”

“You see clouds? Wait.” The fog folded in on itself. Colors appeared. Definite forms began to congeal. One of them was Harry, and one of them was me.

“That's better,” I said, tentatively moving my arm. The arm disappeared.

“Your arm's in another dimension now,” Harry explained. “We're in a three-dimensional cross section of infinite-dimensional superspace. If you try, you can get your arm back.”

I tried. And then my arm was back, though the hand was still missing. I examined the stub where my arm ended. It looked as if my hand had been chopped right off. I could see the bone and its marrow, the muscle tissues, and the round mouths of the veins. Yet no blood was spurting out.

“Flip your wrist,” urged Harry.

I flipped my wrist some funny way, and suddenly my hand was back. This was pretty interesting. I gave Harry's head a push, and watched it disappear. Peering down into his neck, I could see the
insides of his lungs and stomach. But then his head snapped back.

“Where's our universe?” I asked Harry. Our two bodies seemed quite definite now, though nothing else did. Everything else was just shifting patterns of colored light.

“It's that spot there,” said Harry, pointing at a small, egg-shaped blob of hazy white.

“What are all the other spots?”

“Other universes, of course. I've been here before. Briefly. When I got blunzed the first time, I came here to find the Looking-Glass World.” Harry indicated a reddish patch of light near the white one that was home.

“Why are they so small?”

“That's from our position on the size axis. There's an axis for everything here.”

I floated closer to our universe and peered at it. The hazy white light was patterned into whorls and dots. Galaxy clusters.

“Right now we're in a space parallel to our universe's time,” said Harry, taking my arm. “But we can turn sideways.”

He yanked at me and everything changed again. Now our universe egg was striped like a watermelon, filamented like a gooseberry. Bright lines stretched from one pole to the other.

“The Big Bang is down there,” said Harry, pointing at one end. “See how some of the loops lead back? That's what you were doing when you got blunzed. Leading them back.”

Looking more closely, I could see that our universe was really made up of a single tangled thread, a bright line that wove forward and back and in
and out. It was like an endlessly knotted wire, a tangle of yarn, the Gordian knot. I looked at some of the other universes, knotty eggs all around us. We were really behind the scenes.

“. . . different axis for each property,” Harry was saying.

“Can we change the scale? I'd like to be able to see Earth.”

“Sure.” Harry tugged my arm again, and things changed like images in a kaleidoscope. I felt dizzy and longed for something to stand on.

No sooner thought than done. We were standing in a hallway with peeling yellow walls. The universe egg floated in front of us, an infinitely detailed image in a crystal ball.

“Is this real?” I scuffed at the dirty floor. Spit, cigarette butts, hair.

“This is the transport axis. We see it our own way. I think we can get a scale change up ahead.”

Walking down the hall, we passed several closed doors. I wondered who or what lay behind them. I wondered, but I didn't want to know. I kept having the feeling that we were being watched by some cool, detached intelligence just out of sight.

At the end of the hall were some rotten-looking stairs. When I put my foot on the first step, the wood broke through and scraped my leg. “We better hug the wall,” I suggested. “That'll be more solid.” I had the feeling that something was following us. Surely Harry and I were not the only beings to have entered Superspace.

We hurried up the decaying staircase as best we could. The universe egg stayed always a few meters ahead of us. With each step, the detail in it
grew finer. I could see individual stars now, and one star that I imagined to be the Sun.

The staircase stopped abruptly. Peering over the edge, I could see down into the light-patterned chaos of before. There was a frayed rope dangling over the abyss. I reached out and pulled on it. Slowly the board we were on began to rise. It was as if we were on a painter's scaffold.

Harry helped me pull at the rope, and we rose up and up into the cluttered dark, the universe egg always just above us. You could see Earth now, North America, New Jersey—my hand slammed into a rusty pulley.

“I don't think it goes any higher, Harry.” Our platform was swaying and my footing began to slip. I was sure I could hear someone breathing nearby. “Get us out of here, Harry, something's after us!”

“Wait, I'll imagine a way out. Yes!” He yanked me sideways and I heard a great creaking. A kind of bench came floating over to us. Crumbling metal struts led from the bench to some distant machinery. It was like a giant carnival ride, a cross between a roller coaster and a Ferris wheel. We both jumped for the bench, and the scaffold's rope snapped.

For a moment I thought we weren't going to make it. Hanging there for that split second I finally found the courage to look over my shoulder.

There was a man behind us, a run-down man with short hair and lambent eyes. He had the taut features and heavy stubble of a drifter. His lips were slightly parted to show his crooked teeth. Seeing me notice him, he gave the barest flicker of response—a twinge of gloating, a pulse of lust. His
cool, hungry stare filled me with horror. I reached out for the now-receding bench with all my strength—and made it.