Alternities (49 page)

“We don’t consider basic human functions state secrets, if that’s what you mean. Healthy adjustment—”

“Fuck that,” Wallace said. “Could someone explain to me why this matters?”

“I’d like someone to explain it to me, too,” Bayshore said, looking to Davis.

“Sexual mores are critical factors in the social construct,” the ethnologist said, frowning. “Sexual competition drives economic systems. Sexual selection determines value systems. The energy’s there. You have to look at how it’s channeled, dammed, diverted. You have to know where it goes. Believe me, it’s not voyeurism.”

“Then ask him what he knows, not what he’s done,” Bayshore said gruffly. “That’s the only way you’re going to get anything useful out of a sample of one.”

Dr. Anderson tried to mount a protest. “We need hard data, objective facts, not guesses and impressions. An individual knows his own experiences—”

Bayshore raised his hands. “That’s it. Thank you. Dr. Anderson. Malcolm, who’s next?”

I like this man
, Wallace thought as the counselor gathered up her papers in stony silence.
Not a friend, perhaps, but at least an ally—

“You can’t fool me,” Shan said, leaning close and whispering. “You just didn’t want me to hear about your other women.”

“That’s right,” he said. “Rich, how about a break? The washerwoman’s starting to wear me down.”

Bayshore nodded. “Ten minutes, everyone. Malcolm, why don’t you try to find out what’s keeping Dr. Eden?”

With Bayshore exercising a firmer hand over the proceedings, they managed to squeeze three more interviewers into the afternoon session—a business historian, a specialist in geopolitics from the Department of State, and an epidemiologist.

Wallace told the historian about Columbia bicycles and Federal Foods, the State analyst about the consolidation of Germany and the ’59 Egyptian war, the epidemiologist about the Guinea grunge and the hepatitis scares. All three seemed more understanding of his lapses than their predecessors.

And all three focused more sharply on the chronology of the stories they were hearing. What’s the earliest you heard of X? How far back did Y happen? When did Z disappear? The same theme recurred when the core group gathered in the parlor after dinner for the roundtable.

“I’m going to be heretical. I’m starting to think the details don’t matter,” Davis pronounced.

Bayshore shot a questioning glance to the other end of the couch. “We spent a good nine and a half hours on details today because you said they were important.”

“They were. I think they’ve already told us all they can.”

“Which is what?” Wallace asked.

“Confirmation of the basic fact we had already.” He uncoiled a finger in Shan’s direction. “You were born when?”

“June 2, 1951.”

“And you, Rayne?”

“August 29, 1952.”

“A matter of fifteen months between them. And yet she belongs to the Common World, and he doesn’t. Whatever happened, happened then, during that fifteen-month span. When she was conceived, there was one world. When he was conceived, there were many. One root stock, divided into many branches. The way it looks to me right now, at the moment of the Split everything that followed was randomized, right down to the level of which spermatazoan nailed which egg. Every alternity is another roll of the dice.”

“Then why are they so alike?” Shan asked. “I didn’t hear anything today that couldn’t have happened here or been created here.”

“There’s an underlying symmetry,” Davis acknowledged, “but that’s to be expected. There’s a limited determinism at work, a certain momentum in human affairs that creates high-order probabilities and weighs against certain other events or turns.”

“A limited determinism,” Bayshore echoed.

“Yes. The initial differences were small, trivial even—but the alternities have continued to diverge over time. Now, almost three decades later, they’re more or less independent, children of a common parent, each following its own pattern. Language, customs, politics, geopolitics, mores, technology—they’ve all diverged. By now something approaching half the population of each alternity is unique to that alternity.”

Bayshore sighed and covered his mouth with steepled hands. “Christ, I knew I didn’t want this job,” he said tiredly. “So you’re saying the Split didn’t happen suddenly.”

“It could have happened suddenly. It just wasn’t dramatic, and there’s no point in working Rayne over in a quest for the exact moment,” Davis said. “It’s either right there in our history, too, or it passed without any notice at all.”

“What about the reason?” Shan asked. “Is that there in our history?”

Davis surprised them all by shrugging and saying, “Who says that there is a reason?”

Bayshore nearly jumped out of his seat. “Sweet Norfolk, Malcolm—”

“Maybe Rayne is right,” Davis said. “Maybe this is just the way things are.”

“You don’t believe that. You didn’t believe it when he said it.”

Instantly, the ethnologist’s body language went from open to closed. “What do you want me to say? That it’s a fucking miracle? That God got good enough at the game that he decided to play on more than one board at a time? What good does that do?”

Leaning toward Davis, Bayshore reached for his shoulder. “Malcolm, I’ve got to report to the President on this. I need to know why this happened.”

Pulling away to avoid the touch, Malcolm left his seat and retreated to the parlor’s wide entry arch. “I don’t want to know, if you want the truth,” he said.

Bayshore grunted and slumped against the back of the couch. “Yeah. I understand that, all right.” He blew a breath into a cupped hand and looked toward Wallace and Shan. “Either of you any braver?”

It was Shan who spoke. “I’ve been thinking that we’re never going to know why, even if we find out when,” she said slowly. “It’s like… like someone called our name just as we were about to step out in the street in front of a car. Whatever was about to happen, didn’t. There’s no way to get the number of the car that didn’t hit us.”

Bayshore nodded thoughtfully. “I can almost live with that. Except I want to go on and ask ‘how?’ and ‘who?’ And questions like that are just going to keep Mrs. Bayshore’s boy awake at night.”

“There’s something else to think about, too,” Shan said. “However and whyever it happened, whatever force was responsible—is the Split reversible? Are the alternities going to converge again?”

“How can they?” Davis said contemptuously, taking a step back into the room. “Think of our extra two billion, and the next alternity’s two billion, and the next, and the next—”

Shan said, “Maybe it will be gradual. The same child born simultaneously in two or more alternities—then another—”

Sitting forward, Bayshore rested his chin on folded hands. “Or perhaps time isn’t moving at all. Maybe we’re on some sort of spur. Like a roller-coaster loop-the-loop, carrying us around in a circle back to the moment of the Split.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Davis said scornfully.

“It makes as much sense as any of this,” Bayshore snapped. “It’s clean and simple, at least. I’m just trying to get rid of the problem of the extra people.”

“By discarding them?” Wallace said.

“Nothing personal.”

“But plenty egocentric,” Shan said harshly. “The Chosen People of a capricious God—”

“I was just thinking out loud,” he said defensively. “What I want is for Dr. Eden to come tell us this is just a bit of trickery on the part of Mama Nature, so we can put the who’s and why’s to rest.”

“You lack a sufficiently paranoid imagination. Rich,” Davis said quietly.

“What do you mean?”

Davis hooked his interlocked hands behind his neck. “We don’t really know what Rayne and his people were doing here. Maybe they came here to disrupt us, to cripple us. I’m not saying Rayne knows the answer. But his bosses do.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t you see? It’s entirely possible that all the different alternities are in competition with each other—a competition that only one can win. That somewhere, sometime, a champion will be crowned to carry forward.”

“Crowned or chosen?”

He shrugged. “Your choice. A philosophical preference.”

“And the rest? What about the other alternities? What about the losers?”

The ethnologist’s voice was hoarse. “Gone, like we were never here.”

Endicott bound Rachel to the standing frame before he said good-bye. Naked, her limbs splayed in an X, she was open to him, and he caressed her lovingly, knowingly, until her body shuddered and strained at the cords which held her. He brought her fragrant wetness to her lips with his fingers, then seized her mouth in a burning, tongue-raping kiss.

When he stepped back, somehow she knew. “Is tonight the night?” she asked.

He had intended not to tell her, but he could not he to her. “Yes.”

“You’re going to kill me.”

It was easier for her to say than for him to acknowledge. A nod was all he could manage as he felt in the pocket of his robe for the little ring.

“I thought that was gone from you,” she said, her voice breaking the smallest bit. “I thought that we’d put that—anger to rest. I thought I could tell—”

“Not anger. Never anger,” he said. Within the privacy of his pocket, he slid the ring on the middle finger, then rotated it so that the soft bulge was turned inward, toward the palm. “Not then. Not now. This is—necessity.”

He stepped forward and caressed her cheek gently with his right hand. She did not flinch. Her eyes, empty of light but for the brightness of tears, fixed on his.

Necessity. Not because he was afraid—but because conformity was the price of protection, for himself, for the initiative. Because Madison had decreed, and Robinson concurred. Keep a tidy house, Walter, they had said. This incident is closed, but we can afford no others. In critical times there must be caution. So for caution, he would kill her.

“Please don’t—”

“Your victory is that I wish there was no need,” he whispered. “My gift is a death without pain. Madison promised me that.”

Rachel made a plaintive sound which was both protest and surrender and looked away, down toward the floor.

Cradling her head in his hands, Endicott kissed her forehead tenderly. Then his hands moved lightly, the left downward to her neck, the right lifting her chin so that he could kiss her lips. She accepted the kiss, and he pressed the ring hard against the side of her throat. The tiny needle pierced its protective shroud and stabbed into soft skin, discharging its minute toxic burden.

He felt her body twitch in surprise. Then Rachel broke the kiss, pulling her head back. “No. Oh, no,” she said. A faint tremor ran through her body, a cold shiver felt within. Short seconds later, her body sagged against the ropes, her eyes closing as in sleep.

His own eyes wet with tears, Endicott kissed her forehead one last time, then cut her down with care. He did not have words for what he was feeling, could not imagine that words existed equal to the confused torrent.

But when the body was gone, entrusted to Evan’s custody, Endicott took ax and crowbar to the room’s damning furnishings with a terrible violence that was all too familiar.

It did not take long for everyone in the safe house to learn that Richard Bayshore was having a bad day. The night had passed without any sign of Warren Eden, and Wallace and Shan came down from their room for breakfast to find Bayshore and Davis locked in a shouting match.

“Chess? He’s playing a goddamned game of chess?” Bayshore bellowed.

“What do you want me to do, send the Marines in to kidnap him? You know what Eden’s like.”

“He’s missed a whole day of sessions. If he’s not on the plane soon, he’ll miss another.”

“We’ve faxed transcripts of everything we did yesterday to him through the Sacramento office. He says he’ll have them read before he gets here.”

“And when is that gonna be?”

“I understand he’s up two pawns.”

Bayshore threw his hands in the air and stalked out.

“Rich has a lot of pressure on him,” Davis said apologetically to Wallace. “He’ll pull things together.”

“That was this Dr. Eden you were talking about?”

“Yes.”

“What’s going on?” Shan asked. “Doesn’t he understand how important this is? Or doesn’t he believe it?”

“Oh, he understands. He takes it seriously. He called me this morning at five A.M, to give me a twenty-minute critique of our roundtable last night. Listen, this is a man who thinks so fast that I can hardly hold a real-time conversation with him. It took me an hour after I hung up to pick through what was backed up in my buffer. We’re not likely to leave him behind.”

“It being five a.m, might have had something to do with your trouble,” Shan said.

“Charitable child,” Davis said with a smile. “Look, there’s fresh corn muffins and orange juice in the kitchen. Better grab something before the thunder lizard returns.”

Through most of the morning session, Bayshore’s impatience was evident but not intrusive. He held his tongue as a substitute human counselor picked up where the banished Dr. Adamson had left off, even forgetting his pique long enough to join the conversation when the subject turned to sex laws.

“Do you mean if two couples get together some Saturday night and swap partners, you’ve got four criminals?” he asked, incredulous.

“I know things are looser here—”

“How would anyone find out? It’s not like you have to apply for a permit to have sex, is it?”

“Gossip gets around. A wife might report her husband. Prostitutes talk to stay out of jail. Mostly it’s when there’s some kind of disease or a baby for proof.”

“So at least they don’t go breaking down doors to see who’s sleeping with whom,” Shan said, relieved.

“They’re just trying to protect families.”

“Great way to help,” Bayshore said. “Throw mom or dad in jail.”

Wallace grew defensive. “Not jail. There’s weekend work camps for all kinds of little offenses. There was a guy on our street who got caught who ended up on a crew repainting the fire house.”