Regarding Ducks and Universes (24 page)

“I
t’s a universe very much like this one,” whispered the professor, seeming quite pleased with himself now that the cat was out of the bag. “Very much like this one,” he repeated, rubbing his hands together like a mad scientist in a cartoon, except that he seemed sane enough. We had stopped at the end of the basement corridor. There was a steel door. “All right, I should tell you that you enter Singh’s lab at your own risk,” the professor said, his voice still low. “Not from the apparatus, of course, but there’s a chance the DIM agents might show up a day early. Unlikely, and in any case, I’m merely showing you around the building, which hardly constitutes unauthorized research. Still—”

Before I had a chance to reflect on whether this was a good idea, he unlocked the steel door with a surprisingly ordinary key and let us in.

A set of concrete stairs led down to the subbasement lab. The open door had triggered a switch, causing a row of ceiling lights to come on. Several modern-looking computer stations dominated the large space; next to one wall lay a mound of haphazardly deposited electronic equipment and, on the opposite side, shelves held lab supplies. At the far end of the room, there was an iron railing I couldn’t see over. In the very center of the lab, a small cylinder waited on a circular platform, like a kitchen water boiler someone had placed on a tall stool and forgotten. Several cables of various colors and thickness led from the cylinder to the computers and elsewhere.

Pak took the stairs down two at a time like he was used to the place and started flicking on the computer monitors one by one. We followed him down, Professor Maximilian going last and locking the door behind him.

The professor slipped the key into his shirt pocket. “I found the lab key in the back of a desk drawer the day I moved into my office—Professor Z. Z. Singh’s old office. Couldn’t figure out what it opened. Then one morning while walking around the building trying to figure out a particularly knotty research problem, I found myself in the basement and remembered the key.” He headed straight for the cylinder, lifted up the lid, and checked inside. “No notes from Max C. The research problem I was grappling with at the time was how to estimate the mass of the prime mover whose actions had warped space-time enough to bifurcate the universe. Being able to run lab experiments with Singh’s equipment resulted in a breakthrough and we were able to come up with the twenty-four-libra figure.”

“We?” Bean asked, her voice even.

“Pak and I,” the professor admitted, replacing the lid. “I didn’t want—well—I didn’t want to involve too many students in this.”

“It doesn’t work like a modern crossing,” Pak said from a computer station, perhaps to distract Bean. “Only small objects can be transferred to Universe C and back.”

“Pak and I snuck in new, faster computers during lunchtime one day, and also a power source independent of the main grid. It used to take Zachary Zafar Singh three hours to transfer a note—a simple piece of paper—from one universe to the other. It takes us less than a minute. The equipment still loses a few bits here and there in the transfer because of link skips and interference. I wouldn’t try it on anything animate.” Seeing my expression, Professor Maximilian clarified, “Scrambled eggs. The Singhs discovered that it’s very hard to put an egg back together once you’ve taken it apart.”

“There was a race between the A and B teams of physicists to see who would be the first to accomplish transfer of animate matter,” Arni said. “The problems were many—stabilizing the link, speeding up processing time, eliminating interference from visible light and other electromagnetic waves straying into the field.”

“Which side won?” I asked.

“Neither. The scientists discovered they needed each other’s cooperation.”

“In any case, we have what we need, a stable connection kept open by the continual exchange of air molecules. To send an object to Universe C, you place it inside the cylinder. Any notes
from
Universe C arrive there as well. The cylinder is both the Inbox and the Outbox.” The professor beamed at the Inbox/Outbox like a proud parent.

I wandered over to the railing and peered down. Below, a thin, corkscrew-shaped tube burrowed in both directions into a tunnel, like a giant, never-ending apple (or papple) peel. I turned back to face the room and asked the most obvious question first. “But what
is
Universe C?”

“It’s a budding universe,” said the professor. “Just branched off yesterday.”

“Seventeen hours, eleven minutes, and fifty-three seconds ago, to be precise,” Pak said from his computer. “Fifty-four seconds…fifty-five…”

“And this?” I pointed down at the apple peel.

The professor cleared his throat. “That’s an old Singh vortex generator. Luckily Singh and his students could never get it to work.”

“Why?”

“They didn’t have enough power to generate so powerful a vortex.”

“No, I mean why luckily?”

“An unconstrained vortex of that size would have converted all nearby matter, including this lab and probably the whole side of the building, to information and exchanged it with whatever was in its place in a neighboring universe.”

I took a step away from the railing. “It’s not going to accidentally beam us somewhere, is it?”

“No danger of that.”

I stepped over some cables and went to the Inbox/Outbox and, like the professor had, lifted up the lid and looked inside. It was empty, save for some newspaper shreddings layered on the bottom, ready to be exchanged with whatever arrived from Universe C, presumably. With a start I realized what I was standing in front of—a miniature version of the crossing chamber in which I’d been turned into a number and back. “The link to Universe C is in
here
?”

“A link is a two-sided information-swapping mini-vortex that can be enlarged as needed,” said the professor, who clearly thought he was speaking lucidly. He was by the wall shelves, standing on a stool to reach a container with office supplies. He took the container off the shelf and started rummaging in it. “I think we have some notepaper left…Think of it as a puff of air vibrating as it’s continuously being converted to information and exchanged. As a matter of fact, links between universes occur naturally, though mostly in microscopic form, which is why we don’t notice them. I’ve always wondered if that’s how the odd sock disappears from laundry on occasion,” he chuckled without looking up from the container of office supplies.

“I don’t see anything other than newspaper shreddings.”

“It drifts around,” Pak said from where he was watching the clock tick off the seconds that moved ours and Universe C apart.

Just for a moment I thought I saw a shimmer of something in the cylinder, like a bit of warm summer air dancing above hot pavement, but I lost it. I put the lid back on and turned to where Pak was sitting. On the worktable next to his computer sat a plant, a multi-limbed cactus with delicately intertwined white spikes all over it, like dangerous cake frosting; on the top of each limb, barely open purple buds were beginning to droop. Immediately above the cactus a watering can sat on a platform. Attached to it was a small black box, a counter, a switch, and a pulley that looked like it could change the angle of the platform.

Pak noticed my interest.

“The lace hedgehog? My mother’s birthday present,” he explained. “I’m planning on giving it to her next week. One can only link to a fresh universe. The professor and I set up the radioactive decay apparatus and turned it on seventeen-some hours ago after making sure the event radius encompassed this room only. There was an even chance that the hedgehog would get watered.”

“You linked a watered-cactus-happy-mother-universe to a dead-cactus-irate-mother-universe. Interesting,” Arni said.

“Did we get the dry one or the watered one?” Bean asked. She reached over and poked the dirt at the base of the lace hedgehog with her finger. One of the wilting flower buds fell off the plant. “Dry.”

“Wait,” I said. “You’re holding a universe open on the assumption that your mother will get mad at you if she gets a wilted birthday plant? Maybe she’ll just be happy to get a present, Pak, same as if you gave her the watered one.”

“She won’t.”

Professor Maximilian, still rummaging around on the supply shelves, waved his student’s parental issues aside. “If Max C and Pak C haven’t found their bookmark yet we can tell them about it. Tomorrow we turn one of the bookmarks over to the DIM officials, who’ll leave happy and won’t bother us for a while. We really need to get more notepaper. We don’t keep research notebooks for obvious reasons, but that has its inconveniences.”

“Back up a bit,” I said. “One of the Professors Maximilian will have a bookmark and the other nothing?”

“Correct.”

“How will you decide which Maximilian gets the bookmark?”

“It doesn’t matter. Maybe we’ll toss a coin.”

“And the universes will reconnect once the cactus is watered?”

They all gave me a strange look.

“Perhaps I didn’t explain it well.” The professor got off the stool and came over to where I was standing. “Our radioactive decay yabput yielded two universes, watered and dry. We—all of us—exist in both. And whatever universe we’re in, watered or dry, will seem to us to be a continuation of Universe B. The other will seem like C.” He chuckled. “My counterpart is probably at this very moment explaining the plan to
his
graduate students. Either he or I will get to keep the bookmark, continue the work, and report back to the other. Simple enough.”

I looked down at the professor. “Won’t you mind if you’re the one unable to continue your research?”

He folded his arms across his chest. “Mind? Of course I would mind. I’m open to suggestions if anyone has a better idea.”

“Perhaps the group that ends up without the bookmark can create two new universes,” Bean said after a moment, “and get a bookmark from each—one to keep, one to give to DIM officials—and then each of those universes could create two new ones, and each of those two more, creating a kind of a cosmic geometric progression.”

“I get it. It’s like the number of ancestors doubling in each generation as you go backward in time,” I said as the professor picked up a taller chair, took it over to the shelves, and climbed on it to check the top shelf. I heard him mumble, “There’s got to be paper somewhere. Max C and I will need to exchange a few notes on this…”

I was going to say, “Let’s forget the whole thing before it’s too late.” Instead, looking around the disordered room with its computer cables leading everyplace, shelves overflowing with supplies, and old equipment piled in a heap in the corner, I said, “It’s interesting to see where it all began. Singh’s laboratory is so, er—untidy. I was picturing something more sinister, a sterile lab with men in white coats.”

It had to have taken spunk, I thought, to descend daily into the subbasement to tinker with universes.

“Professor Singh had graduate students helping him,” Bean said, as if reading my mind.

“Glad you like it, Felix,” Professor Maximilian chuckled from the shelf without turning around. “Nothing wrong with showing a visitor or two around the building. You”—his remark was addressed to me—“could hardly be accused of performing unauthorized research. I, on the other hand, have waited a long time to be able to get my hands on some experimental equipment…a long time…

“But you’re right,” he added briskly and got off the chair. “Everyone best leave this room. We have a coin to toss. Sorry, kids.”

“What?” Bean exclaimed.

“Except for Pak. I need an assistant. We’ll do it this afternoon. That should give us plenty of time to obtain the extra bookmark and be ready for tomorrow’s surprise visit by the DIM agents. In the worst case”—he shooed us toward the stairs—“if things go badly and DIM finds out about Universe C and revokes my research authorization, well, maybe I’ll try my hand at doing something else after I get out of the work camp.” He unlocked the door and opened it for us.

“Culinary products?” I asked from the doorway.

“I was thinking along the lines of a self-cleaning kitchen. Modular, with seven components for a typical household and eighteen for a restaurant. The book, Felix?”

I handed him
Stones, Tombs, and Gourds
, which I had been clutching the whole time, the bookmark peeking out of it. Next to me Bean took out a small notepad, similar to Mrs. Noor’s, out of the back pocket of her jeans and ripped off the top few pages and handed the rest to the professor. “You’ll need this. I’ve been using it for note-taking in my belly dancing class. Ask Bean C if she’s figured out what event chain the duck pacifier started.”

“Ask Professor Maximilian C if he’s figured out why my parents were in San Francisco that day,” I said. “Wait, there should be a Felix C around, shouldn’t there? Ask him instead.”

Arni chimed in. “Ask Arnold C if he’s finished working with Olivia May and if I can have his notes—”

Professor Maximilian locked the door behind us.

M
y routine at home each workday morning was to jump from a bicycle to a people mover to a bicycle and again in the reverse direction from my office each afternoon. Missing that daily exercise and feeling my midsection ballooning by the minute, I picked up the pace and so was the first to step into the only intersection we had to cross on our way from the Bihistory Institute to its parking lot. The moment of inattention almost cost me my life, or at least a broken bone or two. A car suddenly appeared out of nowhere and would have splattered me if a hand belonging to Arni hadn’t pulled me out of harm’s way.

“Universe B,” I gasped, watching the car speed away and noticing that it was as sleekly black as not a thing in a kitchen except perhaps the inside of a nonstick pan, “doesn’t seem to like me very much. That’s the second time that’s happened. Pedestrians have the right of way, don’t they?”

“One can’t be too careful,” Arni said, releasing my arm.

After that I pretty much had to invite him to lunch too.

The Organic Oven was just as Mrs. Noor had described it—the newly renovated dining room held square tables fashioned from rustic, roughly finished red cedar with a touch of elegance provided by the silverware, wine glasses, and the basket of breadsticks which sat waiting on each table. Handcrafted natural stone decorated the walls. A lingering lunch clientele occupied maybe a third of the available tables.

Whether the head chef was (a) still in Carmel, or (b) back at work in the kitchen, concealed from customers’ eyes by a set of swinging doors, or (c) in his study in the Egret’s Nest Apartment Complex feverishly working on the next novel in his mystery series—
or (d) driving around town in a black car with its windows darkened
—there was no way of telling.

Neither Bean nor Arni commented on the fact that I had chosen the Organic Oven as our lunch destination, though I thought I heard Arni murmur, “Doesn’t this
really
violate the Lunch-Place Rule?” as we sat down at our table.

Expecting a reception similar to the one I had received at the Coconut Café—mistaken recognition—I cringed when the waiter appeared, but he simply placed menus into our hands and left.

Bean cleared her throat and opened her menu. “Let’s see, what looks good?”

I took my time reading the menu. It was printed on rough—organic?—paper and consisted of a single page with a dozen lunch entrées listed on the front and a dessert and drinks list on the back. A well-known rule of thumb is that it’s the cheapest, not the priciest, item on a menu that reveals how good a restaurant is. My eye stopped midway down the list. There it was. The humble chicken breast sandwich, the first item I usually order at a new restaurant in a quest to find one reminiscent of the crusty-bread-tender-chicken-tangy-pickles combinations I remembered from my early teen years before I lost my sense of smell.

All the strategy had gotten me so far was a list of ways to ruin a chicken sandwich: overcooking the chicken to a dense slab, slicing it too thick or too thin, smothering it in huge dollops of sauce, under-seasoning it to tofu-ness, wrapping it in bread that was mushy or rock hard, pairing it with a pile of boring, salty potato chips…Let’s see what
your
staff can do, Felix, I thought.

“I think I’ll have the duck l’orange,” Arni said. “Just kidding. Enough of ducks and duck pacifiers. Caesar salad with wild caught salmon and natural camel cheese it is,” he said to the waiter.

“The handmade fettuccini with spinach pesto,” Bean ordered.

“The free-range chicken breast sandwich,” I said to the waiter, then added after he left, “No, it doesn’t.”

“What?” Arni said.

“Violate the Lunch-Place Rule, my being here. I’ve never had lunch at the Organic Oven before. I don’t even know if there
is
an Organic Oven A.”

“And what if Felix B is in the kitchen?” Arni asked.

I recalled him saying that people sooner or later invariably faced their alters to satisfy their own curiosity. He didn’t know, of course, that I had already met Felix. I felt reluctant to mention it.

“I don’t plan on going into the kitchen.”

The waiter reappeared with a large pitcher, poured water into our glasses with a flourish, and said, “Transported here weekly from hidden springs in the Sierras.”

A strange mood had come over me. Recklessly for my identicard balance, I decided to order wine for the table. “We’d like some wine with our lunch. Do you have Napa Valley Zinfandel—?”

“Of course.” He wrote the order down. “Our wine is made from pesticide-free grapes misted with spring water and when ripe picked by hand at sunset, then crushed the old-fashioned way and aged in oak casks. The wine is subject to the inter-universe import tax,” he added.

“Inter-universe import tax?” I said. “What about the local wines?”

“Scratch that,” interrupted Bean before the waiter could answer. “Water is fine.”

As the waiter, looking miffed at the loss of the extra tip, stalked off, Bean explained. “Our Napa Valley isn’t producing any more. Too much precipitation. It rots the grapes. California B imports its wine from California A. It’s become somewhat of a luxury item.”

“A consequence of the global warm-up,” muttered Arni. “On the plus side, all the rain means we haven’t had a drought in years.”

“Why did you let the global warm-up get out of hand?” I asked sharply.

They stared at me.

“Never mind. I don’t know what made me ask that.”

“Universes are like people,” Bean said. “It’s easier to see the solutions to other people’s problems. It’s the loop.”

“Did you say the loop?”

She reached over and selected a breadstick from the basket in the middle of the table. “Suppose you never made a single choice, like Passivists do. Don’t. Whatever. Just sat in a park under a tree all day avoiding trouble. It wouldn’t work. Eventually something would happen. Maybe not the first day, or the next—but wait long enough and
something
would. What, no one can tell you. You might be stung by a bee or bopped on the head by a falling branch or catch pneumonia from spending soggy nights in the park.” She poised the untouched breadstick over the table. “I’m going to let the breadstick fall in a moment. About all I can tell you in advance is that it’s going to roll about a bit on the table and then stop. I have no idea in which direction it will roll and I have no idea where it will come to a stop.” She let the breadstick fall. It immediately came to a wobbly rest on her silverware and did not roll. “Humph. You see? Arni here and I, we
think
that proving you and Felix B are the universe makers will bring us our PhDs, lead to good jobs, make you two famous—but who knows what will really happen? We’ll probably end up in a work camp for violating Regulation 19.” She shrugged, retrieved the breadstick, and took a crunchy bite.

I reached across the table to take one of the breadsticks myself.

“Life’s unpredictability is a good thing, in my opinion,” she went on after a moment. “The first adventurous marine creature that decided that it might be a good idea to crawl out of the seas onto that interesting, warm, dry stuff we call sand had no idea what it was getting into, I’m sure…I am getting off track. What was I saying?”

“Why it’s hard to see the solutions to your own problems. What’s in these?” I asked, suddenly distracted from the topic at hand.

“They’re just sourdough breadsticks,” Bean said.

“I can taste them.”

“Never liked sourdough myself,” said Arni. “Too sour. In my opinion, bread should be neutral.”

“Anyway, as to the loop,” Bean went on, “we all know that we have the power to change our lives. But in the back of our mind is a tally of all the times that things didn’t turn out as expected because of random chance, other people’s behavior, false assumptions we’d made, or the disconnect between how we see ourselves and who we really are. We therefore know that most likely things will not turn out as we expect them to, so we try to take
that
into account but end up going in circles and doing nothing. It’s like that old bit of advice, how do you dress well?”

“How?” I asked, reaching for a second breadstick. Just like that, Regulation 10 be damned, I found myself on board with Wagner’s plan to obtain the sourdough starter for Universe A.

“By doing it with confidence. And how do you gain confidence?”

“I get it. By dressing well,” I said through a full mouth.

“The loop is one of the tenets of Passivist philosophy,” Arni threw in.

“Yes,” Bean replied a trifle testily, “but that doesn’t make it wrong.”

Arni shrugged. “Don’t try to change things. It’s a safe creed to live by.”

“How many are there?” I said, having finished with the second breadstick and looking over the chicken sandwich the waiter had just brought.

“Which?”

“Tenets of Passivist philosophy.”

“Seven.” She ticked them off one by one. “Disturb nothing. Be still. Stand aside. Do only what you must. Embrace the loop. Give everything. Keep nothing.”

“Did you go to many Passivist meetings as a child?” I said. There was an inviting beet salad accompanying the chicken sandwich. I speared a helping onto my fork.

“Every seven days.”

“What did you do at them?” I asked, the sweetness of the beets awakening my palate further.

“Not much.”

A busboy had finished clearing the dishes off the neighboring table; he swept up the crumbs, then wheeled a cart stacked with dirty dishes through the swinging doors, permitting a brief glance of hanging pots and pans. “If Aunt Hen hadn’t left instructions in her will that a photo be mailed to me along with half of her porcelain dolphin collection, I wouldn’t be here today eating this delic—this sandwich,” I said. “I keep wondering if the pet bug quarantine was an unexpected outcome, as you say, or whether James and Gabriella did it on purpose.”

“Does it matter?” Arni replied. “Maybe Granola James took his pet for a walk in the woods, Murphina partook of infected droppings, and, unaware, James brought her to Universe B where you petted her head—”

“She licked my hand,” I corrected him.

“Or he realized she’d gotten infected and took advantage of that fact to position himself in your vicinity. If he did plan it, he probably didn’t expect to see Bean there.”

“Or that I’d be grounded by the pet bug medication in my room at the health center for much of my stay.”

“Irrelevant in any case,” Arni said. “The law differentiates between premeditated murder and involuntary manslaughter, between deliberate pursuit of unauthorized research and a serendipitous discovery. Event chains don’t care.”

I cared. Inconveniences were best left to fate, in my opinion.

“Tell me more about your Passivist childhood, Bean,” I said, wrapping my fingers around the second half of the chicken sandwich. “Did you live on a farm?”

“I had a veggie garden and made my own clothes. The clothes were not very good.”

“What about your parents? Does it bother them that you’re not a Passivist nowadays?”

“They neither approve nor disapprove. If you like we can take a drive down to the farm tomorrow—Saturday—so you can see what it’s like. Everyone sits around and talks and does nothing much after the day’s work is done. It’s quite pleasant, actually, now that I think about it.”

“I have to go back to Universe A tomorrow. My entry permit expires midafternoon. I survived being turned into a number once, can’t say I’m looking forward to doing it again.”

“Tomorrow? That doesn’t give us much time,” Arni said. “Anyone know hypnosis? Perhaps there is a chance your subconscious self remembers what you did with the duck pacifier. Did you say something, Felix?” He accepted a refill of spring water, then added in a low tone after the waiter left, “I’ve been sneaking looks into the kitchen whenever the waiters go in and out. Can’t see much from this angle, though.”

“I wonder what kind of car he drives,” I said.

“Felix B? Why, do you need a ride somewhere?” Bean asked.

I shook my head. The Organic Oven and an adjacent grocery store shared a parking lot, whose attendant had requested sixty dollars for an hour’s worth of parking. I had taken my time paying him, but didn’t spot a black car with darkened windows anywhere in the parking lot. I thought I
might
have caught a glimpse of a two-seater the color of a squishy apricot parked by the back entrance of the restaurant, however.

“You ate that sandwich quickly, Felix,” Arni said.

I balled my napkin onto the empty plate. “I guess I was hungry.”

“Why don’t we ask our waiter if the head chef is here? I could say I want to compliment him on his Caesar salad with the wild caught salmon and the natural camel cheese. It was quite good. Just a hint of anchovies and lemon…scrumptious.” Arni scraped the last bit of salad from his plate and finished it off.

Bean glanced over at me and pushed the leftover fettuccini strands around her plate with her fork. “My pasta is a little soggy.”