Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (2 page)

I am tallest of all, but dark and bushy-browed and thick and broad, hook-nosed and thick-lipped, with a big stupid jaw like a Neanderthal and a sloped forehead like a Cro-Magnon, and big square teeth like a horse so I am afraid to smile at girls, because they might faint; either that, or offer me a lump of sugar.

Dad makes us all wear crew cuts, so my ears stick out. Alexei and Dobrin can carry off the Jarhead ’do. They look like Aryan Supermen straight off the recruiting poster or something. My hair is ink-black and wiry and sticks up no matter how short-cropped it is, so I look like I could use my skull to scrub away stubborn stains in pots.

I could not make a cup of real cocoa, and the kitchen kind of intimidated me, but I did microwave a cup of hot water and dump a powdered mix into it, the kind with mini-marshmallows. The cup sat ignored on the end table next to the couch, unsipped, and I could see clots of brown powder floating in it.

And I was crouching by the fireplace, prodding the log with the poker, trying to get a blaze to come up. I had not gathered firewood, kindling and tinder and all that, since that is a really slow and involved process. I had bought one of those oil-soaked logs wrapped in paper and made out of packed sawdust for a few bucks at the local Mega-mart, the kind you can light with a single match. But I was still poking at it, because it made me feel like I had done something to welcome him home.

In theory, I was supposed to tiptoe upstairs and let him sleep, and not stir from bed until the alarm rang to show that I was officially allowed to be awake.

But I had to ask. There had to be more worlds than this.

“I was talking with Penny,” I answered his question. “Now that the Professor is in the nuthouse, she moved her things into his office at the Haunted Museum, and I was helping clean his desk…and we found something odd.”

He visibly relaxed with every word I spoke. The fear left his face. Apparently the day he thought would someday come, whatever that was, had not come. Whoever he wanted me not to talk to, it was not Penny.

It was a clue. But a clue of what?

I had that familiar, old sensation that my whole life was playing a game of Huckle Buckle Beanstalk with me, but there was no one around to call out ‘warmer’ and ‘colder’ as I drew nearer to or farther from the hidden thimble.

As a child, I always imagined it was the thimble itself that was growing warmer if I blindly stumbled closer to where a brother had hidden it, and that if I touched it, the thimble would be hot enough to burn. It never stopped me. (It was not until my young cousins Alyonushka and Zabava were visiting, the only creatures on Earth blonder than my brothers, and felt sorry for me, and cheated, and whispered clues to me, that I ever found that darned thimble. I remember standing with it in my entirely unburned hands, turning it over and over again, offended that the universe was too stubborn to abide by my elegant theory. It did not make sense. If someone yelled ‘warmer’ that meant that something was getting warmer, right?)

Father’s voice found its old, familiar calm note of fatherly authority again. “You should call her by her last name.”

“What? I am not calling anyone
Penny Dreadful
. It sounds ridiculous. In any case, I don’t even think that is her family’s real name. It is a stage name the Professor made up. I think his real name is
Dunderpfocalypse
or something. Don’t you want to hear what we found?”

He did not look interested. Whatever made him afraid, afraid for me, was receding. The thimble was getting colder.

“If she is now your superior, you must speak with respect of her.”

“She is not my
superior
. Penny is just my boss.”

Dad’s eyes narrowed. “All the more reason to speak of her respectfully, lest you forget yourself with her.”

“Why should I call her by her last name? She is my age! Well, give or take a year…”

“Older than you. Old enough to act as trustee for her father’s estate while he is
non compos mentis
.”

“And I don’t even think she knows how to drive a car yet!”

“Son, that young lady proved herself; she sailed solo around the world in a yacht when she was sixteen years old and made world headlines.”

“She made headlines for
not
sailing around the world, you mean.”

“She gave it the good college try, which shows considerably more application and ambition than any of my sons have displayed. Speaking of which, your applications have not been accepted yet to any college. What are you going to do next year? As of your birthday, I am starting to charge you rent!” The thimble was ice-cold by now. The conversation had somehow transformed into Dad trying to be motherly, which he didn't do very well. He usually ended on a distinctly unmotherly note, such as the warning about rent. And no, he was not kidding.

I bit back the comment that Professor Dreadful could afford to have his daughter wreck a yacht in the Indian Ocean. If Dad was so impressed with daredevilry, then maybe he could buy me a used apple barrel on the cheap; and I could ride it over Niagara Falls.

But I knew better than to argue when he gave me a direct order. After all, I had not raised him; it was the other way around.

So I said, “Yes, sir. So
Miss Dreadful
and me, we were looking through the Professor’s desk, and we found this—I don’t know, some sort of research paper for something he was trying to get published. He was working on the enigma of the CERN Collider Disaster Cuneiform.”

“Don’t call them cuneiform. Sloppy thinking. It is not yet established the cloud chamber markings are in fact a writing system. They could merely be random scratches.”

The Super Large Hadron Collider is seventeen miles in circumference, five hundred feet below ground, near Geneva. It was too large to fit in Switzerland, so part of it overlaps into France, or under it. Because it was buried so deep, the quench event was contained: no one on the surface died. The ALICE facility in sector twelve was subjected to an inexplicable escape of radiation when the bending magnets in the section failed.

If there are verbs for each type of death caused by exposure to various exotic particles, I don’t know what they are: so until then, let’s just say over a dozen scientists, staff members, and visitors were electrocuted, microwaved, and Hiroshima’d. If you have not seen the pictures, don’t look them up, because they are gross. Or just stick a Barbie doll into a toaster. You would not think a thing that operates at a temperature not far above absolute zero could unleash such energy, could you? Well, those guys who died did not either, and they understood the math.

Certain recording instruments — the press insisted on calling them “Black Boxes” even though technically they weren’t — had survived intact, and they showed that some of the mass-energy of particles was unaccounted for, as if it had vanished from the universe.

Meanwhile, the mass-energy polite enough not to have vanished from the universe had turned into an ultrahigh frequency electromagnetic burst, which, strangely, had left an almost symmetrical pattern of dents in the cloud chamber, arranged in rectilinear rows and ranks. It looked too regular to be natural. And it looked oddly like the triangular letters of Sumerian cuneiform.

A signal? If so, from where? From whom?

“The Professor is convinced that they are a writing,” I said stoutly.

“Mm. He says the same thing about crop circles.”

“He is a Harvard-trained symbologist!”

“Amazing what they give degrees in these days. But if you cannot measure it, it is not science.”

“Measured or not, he found the key to translate the Disaster Cuneiform…”

Dad grunted. “Was this before or after he started hallucinating?”

“He really did figure it out!” I said hotly.

Dad made a skeptical noise in his nose, “Him, and no one else? Not likely.”

I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking of Bletchley Park and Project Ultra, Alan Turing and the Enigma Project; of MIT and CalTech; of think tanks and linguists and cryptographers and cryptologists and mathematicians. He was thinking of the National Security Agency, who is the biggest employer of mathematicians and purchaser of computer parts in the world. He was thinking of the NASA team that inscribed the Voyager plate and had experts on the theory of how to make first contact with alien intelligences.

Everyone who was assuming this was a First Contact, assumed we should be doing the things that in theory you should do if you ever pick up signals from space aliens for the first time: you look for common ground. If they are from another planet, your only common ground is the scientific facts of the objective reality surrounding you. What else would you have in common? So you tap about prime numbers in base two or something.

These people—or entities—who inscribed the Disaster Cuneiform were not doing that. Why not? It was as if they were not even trying to be understood. But then why send the code at all? Maybe people from another universe did not even have any objective reality in common with us.

I said stubbornly, “He solved it. He translated it.”

Dad closed his eyes. “How?” And he drawled out the word with a long lingering vowel of disbelief bordering on disgust.
Hao-ooo-ow?

“He sought back to the primordial language, older than Indo-European, theorists say must exist. The ancestor of all languages. The marks that looked like Cuneiform were not a mathematical cipher, and so all the code crackers could not crack it. The marks actually
were
Cuneiform — but a version so primal and ancient, older than Sumer and Babylon, that no record survives. Because he thought it was a message from another branch of history, an Earth whose events never happened, not here. The papers in his desk were about the Many Worlds Theory.”

“It does not make testable statements,” Dad said, laying down his head, and putting his elbow back over his eyes. “So it is the Many Worlds
Interpretation
, not a theory.”

I realized I was bickering. How much of my ten minutes was left? I had to get back on track.

“How many are there?” I pressed. “Worlds, I mean? How many could there be? More than one?”

“The Everett and DeWitt interpretation supposes that every possible outcome for every event at a quantum level defines its own world. That means if one electron twitches for one second in one carbon atom in the photosphere of a giant star in an unnamed galaxy beyond the Virgo Cluster, it creates a new timespace continuum identical, but for that twitch, to ours.” He uttered a noise that was half sigh, half snort. “How that one electron-second has the energy to reproduce the mass of the Big Bang, not to mention the memory to Xerox the location of every particle in the macrocosmic universe, is something Everett and DeWitt did not interpret. Now, Ilya, you’ve known that since you were twelve, when we taught you quantum mechanics.”

One problem with being homeschooled, is that your parents never stop lecturing you: school is never out. The advantage is that you can get a summer job interning for someone like Professor Dreadful, who seems to know everything about everything.

But as Dad spoke this, his words were slow. I did not think it was just because he was tired. Something was making him tense again, although his elbow was still hiding his face. The thimble was warmer, but I was not sure why.

I said, “The Professor’s theory is that only human moral choices would cause a split into two timelines. He thinks the universe was strictly monolinear until the human race evolved.”

“Hmph,” My Dad’s grunt showed that he was less than overwhelmed. He relaxed again. “The point of the Many Worlds Interpretation was to cleave to classical cause-and-effect while saving the appearance of quantum-mechanical events, which are random. It has nothing particular to do with choices mortals make, moral or no.”

So the topic of many worlds theory was warm, and so was the cuneiform, but any theory Professor Dreadful had about those topics was cold. So maybe Dad believed other worlds were real, but thought the Professor was fake.

I had to keep feeling around and get a final answer to my question before fatigue carried Dad away to bed, leaving me with no way to know what to do.

And time was running out. My phone was in my pocket like a bomb.

Groping, I said, “The Professor says that the inanimate universe, and the behavior of plants, animals, and most of the things humans do, are all rigidly determined like clockwork.”

“Well, he’s about a century behind the times. Not even Einstein could save classical causation. It seems God does roll dice after all.” This was all muttered absentmindedly. Dad sounded bored. Very cold now.

I pressed on. “He says most human actions are determined, most, but not
all
. Things that seem like random choices, like deciding whether or not to have a bean burrito for lunch, are just the brain mechanisms acting out their pre-programmed conditioning. Only when we are making a choice that involves a moral question — such as whether or not to break a promise — do we actually interact with something outside of normal causation and above normal psychological mechanisms, an eternal principle only the conscience can perceive; and that is what splits the universe in two.”

Dad just sighed. After a pause, he said, “Do you know how long it took me to make up my mind to ask your dear, sainted mother to marry me, Ilya? If this idea were true, that was all time wasted. I both asked her and also never found the nerve, both raised my sons to be fine young men and also never held them in my arms or heart.

“That choice and every other moral decision would be pointless, because no matter how carefully you use your judgment, in the other branch of time, you always act stupidly. Even to the weakest temptation, in the other branch, you always give in.

“No, the Professor’s Many Worlds idea is just one of those many ideas that are as pretty as the patterns on a poisonous snake, and you stare fascinated by the sinuous Celtic knotwork of its bright coils and gazing in its unwinking cold eyes, you never notice that all it is really telling you is that life is a lie. Don’t believe it. Only liars say life is a lie.”