Regarding Ducks and Universes (3 page)

And that was that.

The DIM officials were escorting the Passivists, who were passively acquiescing, away from the terminal.

It was time to catch that taxi. There were none to be seen.

Why did I need a taxi anyway? I was a man in the prime of my life, just at the three-and-a-half decade mark, and perfectly capable of walking to my hotel. In fact, it was probably a good way to set about reducing the pesky convexness of my stomach. True, it was a little cold, but, it being San Francisco, there was a good chance the fog would clear up any minute. I adjusted the backpack more comfortably across my shoulders and set a course along Hyde Street in the direction of Broadway.

Before I had barely covered a block, a short honk rose above the street noise. A car, one of those with a top that opens up, as indeed it was open now, had slowed down to a crawl next to me. The almost-dog Murphina, her woolly white coat flattened by the westerly wind, sat comfortably ensconced in the front passenger seat of the cucumber-green vehicle. “Can we give you a lift?” Murphina’s owner asked from behind the steering wheel. He gestured toward the only unoccupied seat in the car, next to the A-dweller (or B-dweller) who had attracted attention in the crossing chamber and who was sitting composedly in the back, the white scarf tied around her hair just touching the tangerine dress, her gray eyes fixed on me.

“Thanks,” I said, “but I think I’ll walk. I need the exercise.”

The lanky A-dweller leaned across Murphina and handed me a business card. “We’ll see you around, then.”

I glanced at the card—
Past & Future,
it said and was otherwise blank—as they reentered the traffic stream and disappeared down the street.

T
he following morning found me at the Queen Bee Inn, a three-story Victorian row house nestled between neighboring Victorians on a hill overlooking the bay. Behind the highly polished antique front desk sat Franny, a petite silver-haired woman with a square chin. “I hope you enjoyed your night in the Lilac Room, Citizen Sayers. There was a call for you early this morning, but Regulation 3 protects the personal information of our guests, so we did not disclose that you were here. But I
know
our guests don’t mind if
we
get to know them better—”

Franny had already ascertained what my business on this world was (“just a tourist”) and what I did in life and even that I was single.

“Someone was looking for me? That’s strange,” I said. “I don’t know anyone in town.”

“Seemed like a nice young man. Curly hair, prominent nose.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell. What was the name?”

“Didn’t leave a name, Franny,” a male voice called out from the back room.

“Of course he left a name, dear,” Franny called back and reached for a message ledger. She opened it and started turning the pages. “Now where—”

My stomach tightened with late-morning hunger and, as I waited, I went through a quick mental list of restaurants that served nice, big breakfasts. It didn’t seem right that I was forgoing Coconut Café (
Did
it exist here?) and its weekend pancake special because of some impractical rule about avoiding familiar places. Would it really do much harm to jump in a people mover—that is, hail a taxi—and take a little drive to see if Coconut Café was in its place on El Camino Real in the Redwood Grove neighborhood and if their menu included pecan pancakes?

Luckily I had chosen the Queen Bee Inn. Breakfast was included, already paid for, and set in a buffet in a cozy room to the right of the stairs.

Franny tapped the message ledger. “Here it is, two calls, one right after another. The first citizen, the one with the prominent nose, didn’t leave a message. The second caller—voice only, that one—she said she was trying to get in touch with Citizen Sayers of Universe A because of a development of mutual interest. Didn’t leave a name either.”

A petite silver-haired man with a square chin came in from the back room carrying a cloth and what looked like furniture polish. “Didn’t I tell you that, Franny?”

“You were right, dear.”

He grunted in response and, nodding at me in passing, headed for the row of cubbies where antique keys hung under room names.

“Start with the Rose Room keys, Trevor, dear. We’re expecting newlyweds today.” Echoing my earlier breakfast worries, she added, “I wanted to make sure you’d been warned about the Lunch-Place Rule, Citizen Sayers, before heading out to see the city—”

I had approached the front desk looking for tour brochures.

“—because it’s better not to compare things between our world and your world, that’s for sure,” she added.

Trevor grunted again in agreement without bothering to look up from the large key he had begun polishing.

“Though I have to admit I’ve always wondered what Franny A and Trevor A named
their
inn. The Queen Bee, the B is for the universe, you see. Used to be the Tipsy Sailor.” She sighed. “What a year 1986 was—we were young and had just bought the inn and were struggling to keep it in business…and then to find out that Professor Singh had made a copy of the universe and everything in it! And we were still getting used to solid ground.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Trevor and I were born and raised on an ocean liner, the
Two Thousand Sails
, have you heard of it? We were educated by reading and by traveling the world. The day we married, we got off at the closest port and settled down for good. The port happened to be Oakland, just north of here. They raised the Golden Gate Bridge and we sailed into the bay.”

“That,” Trevor said, still polishing the same key, “was then.”

“Quite right, dear. The ship wouldn’t fit under the bridge nowadays.”

“Why not?” I asked, curious. “The old Golden Gate Bridge is a drawbridge, isn’t it?”

“The ocean level is too high, Citizen Sayers. The drawbridge leaves don’t raise far enough.”

“Speaking of the old bridge—”

“That’s right, Citizen Sayers, you were asking about tours. I must say it’s nice to see an A-dweller on vacation. So many seem to come only for business.”

“People have to earn a living, don’t they,” grumbled Trevor, which might have been the longest sentence I’d heard him utter yet. He hung up the newly cleaned key and picked up another.

“Everyone needs a vacation, no matter what their job is, I say,” Franny shot back, briefly sounding like Wagner, my boss, commanding one of his employees to take time off. “And you are a culinary writer, how nice,” she added more mildly, nodding toward me from behind the front desk. “Do you write restaurant reviews?”

“No.”

“Cookbooks, then?”

“I put together user guides for culinary products.”

“Well, how nice. What kind of culinary products do you make user guides for?”

“All of them. I work for a kitchenware company,” I said, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. Honestly, it was like the woman had never heard of DIM’s Regulation 3 (citizen privacy).

“Oh, a kitchenware company?” She paused, inviting more details, but none were forthcoming. “Well, how nice. Let me get you the tour brochures. By far the best way to get to know the city. Our Universe A guests are always surprised how different everything is, forgetting that we didn’t have the earthquake here, of course.”

She went into the back room for the brochures and I switched my weight back to the other foot, the blisters on them being painful proof of Franny’s words. The city
was
different, as I had found out while looking for the Queen Bee Inn. Having declined the ride from Murphina and her entourage, I’d headed away from the crossing terminal eager to see more of this town that bore the same name as the one I’d just crossed over from, the letter appended at the end seeming something of an afterthought. But not long passed before my step had slowed down to the hesitant gait of a tourist in a foreign land. Hyde Street was where it was supposed to be, and so was Broadway, but where was Memorial Park with its familiar macar trees and the arrow-shaped fountain pointing toward the ocean? Everything felt slightly
off
, like being served chocolate mousse on a paper plate or wine in a mug. I tried one street that I thought should lead toward the bay, then backtracked and tried another. It didn’t help that the fog, instead of dissipating, had continued rolling in from the ocean, shrouding everything in a cool, smoky mist and making me wish I’d brought not sunglasses but gloves though it was mid-July.

San Francisco is a hilly town. As I trekked up one of the bigger hills to the faint distant sound of the foghorn, I came upon a row of Chinese restaurants and tourist shops. The restaurants had looked inviting, and the wise thing to do would have been to go in for an early dinner, then call a taxi. Wise, yes. Human nature, no. Reluctant to admit defeat, I pressed on. After all, my map had shown the inn to be only fifteen stadia from the crossing terminal, a distance which had looked perfectly manageable—and misleadingly flat—on my omni screen.

By the time I found the Queen Bee Inn a couple of steep blocks away from the bay, the sun was low in the sky, my hair was damp from the fog, and I had developed a deep hate of my backpack. I checked in, trudged up the stairs to the Lilac Room, which had a view of the parking lot and not the bay, kicked the sandals off my aching feet, and sat down on the bed determined not to move until morning. For dinner I ordered delivery from a local (and, as per the Lunch-Place Rule, unfamiliar) Chinese restaurant and spent the rest of the evening pleasantly enough, rereading
The Red-Headed League
. I ultimately drifted off to sleep with the thought that Holmes (had he been a real person) would have loathed having an alter—Holmes B, the ultimate adversary, even more so than a doubled Professor Moriarty, competing with Holmes A at every turn for the distinction of solving the next great case. It occurred to me that Hercule Poirot would have been none too pleased either, but Miss Marple would simply have invited the
other
Miss Marple over for afternoon tea, and Lord Peter Wimsey—well, the Lords Peter Wimsey would have studied each other across the room through their matching monocles—

“Citizen Sayers?” Franny had placed several tour brochures on the desk in front of me. “Our breakfast area, the Nautical Nook, is through the glass doors there.”

“I’ll bring these back when I’m done with them.”

“You can keep the brochures, Citizen Sayers.”

“Right.” I was used to plastic, not the use-once-then-toss-out philosophy of paper products.

Speaking of paper—

It was the logical place to begin. Why had I not thought of it before?

“One more thing,” I interrupted Franny, who had turned to help Trevor clean keys. “Is there a store nearby that sells tr—that sells paper books?”

“Oh, what kind of books do you read, Citizen Sayers?”

“Cookbooks and history of cooking for work, mystery classics for fun.”

“How nice. There is a bookstore a few blocks up Starfish Lane. You could take a cable car, but it’ll be faster to walk. Our Universe A guests often ask about bookstores—books made of paper are a waste of trees, they’ll say to me—nothing easier than reaching for the omni around your neck to find a good read. I don’t know about that. Never liked that weirdly shaped screen and all those pictures and whatnots marring the good old-fashioned written word. In any case, don’t judge us too harshly, Citizen Sayers. This world might not be as good as yours when it comes to preserving nature, but we have our good points too.”

“Of course,” I said quickly, avoiding looking at the dozen paper brochures she had just given me. “As a matter of fact, I’ve recently finished putting together a user guide for a kitchen accessory invented by a B-dweller. A potato-peeler-slicer-fryer.”

“That’s kind of you to say, Citizen Sayers. It’s the little things that often matter the most, isn’t it? We all have to do our part.”

Trevor dropped a set of keys with a clang and reached for more polish.

As I went through the glass doors into the Nautical Nook, I overheard Franny say, “Citizen Sayers seems like a nice young man.”

A pleasant stroll along Starfish Lane, with its tiny flower shops, specialty shoe stores, and boutiques, brought me to the front of a large store that spanned almost half a block. The sign above the doors said,
The Bookworm
. I realized I had walked by it yesterday while looking for the inn without realizing what it was. A colorful display of maps, travel guides, and double globes in one of the windows caught my eye and I stopped for a moment before going in.

Summer is our slow season at work—too hot, Wagner likes to say, for customers to think about cooking. Every year, reasoning that his employees’ kitchen-product-idea-generating and user-guide-writing skills could always benefit from new experiences, he signs us up for travel sites which clog our omnis with ads touting sandy beaches and ancient ruins. (I think Wagner overestimates how much he pays us.) I had been wavering between joining Egg and Rocky on their hiking holiday and taking a train tour of the wine country. Going to Universe B had never entered my mind. Too expensive. Egg and Rocky had left earlier in the week to hike the Sierras. As for me—well, I had found out that my official birth date was wrong, that I was older than I thought,
and that I had an alter
. I’d emptied my bank account, bought my ticket, made my reservations at the Queen Bee Inn, and packed my bag. Beyond that—

I was here now.

I went in.

It was a store with, well, books in it.

There were many: Books on tables. Books on bookshelves. Books of all sizes, colors and, presumably, subject matter, filling the available space from wall to wall.