Ten Sigmas & Other Unlikelihoods (2 page)

THE TEOSINTHE WAR

T
he cluster of poodle-skirted sorority girls gave me a vague smile when I sat down beside them. I liked the way the skirts’ material kept rising up on the poofy slips beneath them, exposing bobby-socked calves and saddle shoes. The girl I had my eye on was tall, blond, and curvy. She met my glaze and my daemon pinged to tell me she’d accessed my site. Then the smile turned cold. Apparently minority grad students didn’t meet her standard. At least I got her name — Beth Ringslaught — when she pinged me. But that was all I was going to get. The rest of the girls turned away; they were probably hooked into a local IRC, and Beth had shared my CV with the rest of them. I leaned back in my chair and sighed.

Dr. Elk strode in, a wild pile of paper under one arm and a teacher’s stick in his hand. He tapped the teaching computer with his stick and the lights dimmed.

“Class! Welcome to your senior thesis! I’m Dr. Elk, and I’m as excited about Thesis as all of you are. Our topic this year is ‘Factors of Old World Imperialism.’” Elk was a tall, thin man, his dark hair starting to fade to gray. He had been my advisor — no doubt we were teamed up by some politically correct wonk because of our similar genetic heritage — when I was in the history department, but I’d not talked with him for a year, not since I’d moved to engineering my junior year.

“Why did European culture eradicate every New World culture it came into contact? Were Europeans intrinsically smarter? No! Did they have God on their side? I doubt it!” He slammed his notes on the word ‘God,’ and the poodle girls jumped. I’d known it was coming; his lectures went back to the aughts.

My mind began to drift, watching the clock tick. I’d heard this lecture a half-dozen times since my freshman year. Professor Elk had asked me to audit, and possibly TA, the senior thesis class, so I signed up for it, but never with any more intention than to check out the women in the class. I glanced around. Slim pickings among the rest of the history seniors. I looked over at Beth; the fabric poodle on her skirt was watching me, panting. Nice effect. Maybe one more try, I decided.

“Were they just better?” Dr. Elk picked up a piece of chalk and wrote a word on the board, punctuated by dull clicks. “No, of course not.”

“They had germs,” I whispered to Beth. She glared at me.

“What they had that was better was G-E-R-M-S. Germs. Centuries of city-life had turned their cesspool cities into disease incubators. Those city-dwellers that survived to breed were slightly more resistant than the ones who clogged their cemeteries. The New World had nothing like it. Pizarro was no better than Atahuallpa. His forefathers had just been lucky enough to have a slightly higher than average immunity to small pox!”

“How about some dinner?” I whispered to Beth.

My daemon beeped that a class one harassment complaint had been lodged against me. The poodle bared its teeth.

“By the end of this year, we will have expanded this idea of Old World disease conquering the new world. We will have built a hypothesis and tested it. And we will prove once and for all, that the exploitation of the New World by the Old was a fluke, a whim, a side-effect of barbaric living conditions and chance.”

I yawned. Elk would have to find himself another TA. There were too many other classes I needed to take, and I wasn’t interested in his hypothetical world — probably some world simulator his grad students wrote — in which the New World tribes beat the imperialist dogs of the Old World. That’s why I dropped history in favor of engineering; I wanted to play with real things in the present, not guesses from the past. I slipped out of class, avoiding eye contact with Elk, and headed to the administration building for a quick add-drop.

*

The doorbell wouldn’t shut the hell up, no matter how many times I folded my pillow through four dimensional space. I tossed it aside and stumbled to the door. I kicked aside a pizza box, sending it sailing into my CD collection. The thermo text didn’t budge, and I hopped the rest of the way, holding my throbbing toe.

“What the fuck?” I said, opening the door.

“Ryan Greene?”

About the same time my reptilian brain had determined that a reproduction-aged female was standing in my doorway, my daemon had informed me it was Beth Ringslaught, the poodle-skirted cutie from Elk’s senior thesis class, who’d dropped a class one harassment memo on my ass. My boner flagged.

“Oh, it’s you.”

She didn’t have a poodle skirt on today. She was wearing tight-fitting riding pants that hugged her calves, making her look like she had marathon runner legs. My reptilian brain stirred, then went back to sleep.

“What do you want?” I asked, leaning on the door, scratching my nuts.

It didn’t faze her. “Professor Elk asked me to come see you. He wants you to re-add his class.” Too much sun was beaming down on the apartment courtyard and its leaf-filled pool. I leaned my head against the door frame.

“Why?”

“He needs your help, he said.”

“Listen, I’m not interested in being his Native American poster boy. You seniors just blithely run your sims and make the world a pretend happy place. I’m not interested.”

She shrugged. “Don’t take it out on —”

“Just like you aren’t interested in a guy like me, a poor minority grad student.”

She blinked, her eyebrows slowly rising, her cheeks flushing.

“What are you talking about?”

“The way you and your poodle-friends shut me down in class the other day. It’s clear you think talking with me is slumming.”

Her mouth crooked into a half-smile. “Your site says you’re dating a Miss Janice Huckabee.”

“Your daddy — What?”

“Your site says you’re in a monogamous relationship.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling the heat on my face. “That’s out of date, I guess.” Janice had dumped me at the end of senior year, when I took the grad school gig instead of the Buckell Chemical job on St. Thomas. She hadn’t wanted to date a poor grad student either, though the reception her parents had given me when we drove up from Columbus to Lansing for Christmas break might have had something to do with it.

“As attractive as you may have
seemed
last week, the fact that most of us poodle-girls would like a monogamous, dedicated boyfriend eliminated you as a candidate quickly.” She turned and added over her shoulder, “I’ll let Dr. Elk know your answer.”

I watched her go, noted the lack of panty lines, and made a note to change my site.

*

I was deep in next week’s Plasma notes, Chen’s
Plasma Physics Fundamentals
open on my lap, trying to stay one lecture ahead of the students I was TAing for, when someone knocked on my cube door. I figured it was one of my students coming by for a freebie on the homework set.

“Remember that the magnetic moment is invariant!” I called over the cube wall.

Someone cleared his throat, then said, “I’ll keep that in mind, Mr. Greene.”

“Dr. Elk, I thought you were a student.” I sat up, brushing the pork rind crumbs off my chest.

“Aren’t we all?”

“Um, yeah.”

“I know you rebuffed Beth, but I wanted to take one more go at you.”

“Beth?” My daemon supplied the relevant image. “Oh, your senior thesis class. Really, Dr. Elk, my load is tough this term. Grading, teaching —”

“I have funding and permits for use of the MWD,” Dr. Elk said. His bushy eyebrows rose. Then he winked. Then he left.

I sat there, my jaw aching from where it had kerchunked onto the floor. The bastard. He’d tricked or greased some government cog into letting him use the MWD. Casino money, probably. Or some oil-Indian from Texas. Son of a bitch. He was going to use the Multi-Worlds Device to build a new universe. And he’d just pulled me in too.

I slammed Chen shut and ran after him.

“Hold on, Dr. Elk!”

*

See, the MWD is really about time travel. Only time travel in our own universe is impossible, since it never happened. No time travellers ever showed up in our universe to save Kennedy or patch the O-ring, so there’s no way it’ll work here. If you go back in time and make a change, you build a whole new universe, a malleable one, flexible from the point you make your first change.

Sounds wacky, I know. Where does all the energy come to make a whole universe? Or was the universe already there and we were just tapping into it? And how many universes can the multiverse contain? Are we filling it up to some limit? Is it all going to collapse in on itself? What were the cosmic implications, man? Think!

Back then I didn’t care. I wasn’t a physics wonk, or a morality dweebie. I was just an engineer, but — god damn! — I thought the MWD was cool shit. And the only way I figured I’d ever get involved was from the fusion side of it. It took a lot power to push things to another universe.

That’s why Dr. Elk wanted me. He needed a techie on his side.

*

Beth Ringslaught gave me a wry look when I sat down next to her the next day in class.

“It’s a little late to add-drop, isn’t it?” Her poodle posse giggled.

“You’re not going to file another harassment memo if I sit next to you are you?”

“Maybe. I see you updated your site.”

“You didn’t tell me he was going to use the MWD.”

“The what?”

“The Multi-Worlds Device!”

“Oh, that. That’s just engineering details. I figured working with Dr. Elk would motivate you enough.”

I shook my head. “Can I borrow your notes?”

“I guess.”

Dr. Elk walked in, beamed at me, then began lecturing on the Incas, discharging large expository lumps on the desecration by Pizarro, the effect of European disease, and the exploitation of native culture in the name of god and king. I’d heard it before, so I flipped through Beth’s notes to see what the project was.

Beth kept good notes. Not a single doodle. So I started to add one. Beth grabbed my pen.

“Don’t do that,” she whispered. Her hand shook as she held the end of my pen. Apparently she took her notes seriously.

“Fine.”

Dr. Elk’s thesis was this: European crowd diseases decimated ninety-five percent of the American native populations. Crowd diseases were prevalent in Europe due to high population densities, which were unobtainable in the Americas. High crowd densities were possible in Europe due to the wide range of large-seeded grains, pulses, and domesticated animals that seeped up from the Indus Valley. North America had sunflowers and sumpweed, and the only domesticated animal was the dog. Try pulling a plow with a dog.

The best grain the Americas had was maize. Only it had taken thousands of years to go from corn’s natural ancestor teosinte to the foot-long ears of the modern world. Worse, teosinte had been domesticated in lower Central America, in a climate that was so unlike the rest of the Americas that its propagation was extremely slow. All this added up to the fact that the Americas lagged Europe in food production by about 6000 years.

“Holy shit!” I said. “You’re going to introduce modern maize into ancient America!”

Dr. Elk stopped in the middle of his harangue on smallpox. “I see my faith in you is well-founded, Mr. Greene. It only took you fifteen minutes to catch up with the rest of us.”

“Uh, sorry,” I said, handing the notes back to Beth. She rolled her eyes at me.

*

“So what does that do?”

Kyle looked at me out of the corner of his eye. He sighed. “I’m trying to calibrate the spatial locator.” We were sitting in the control room of the MWD lab in the Barzak Building, overlooking the clean room where the cross-dimensional hole would be opened up.

“Spatial locator of what?”

“A hole.”

“To where?”

“Ancient Mesoamerica! Don’t you have a screen you need to be watching?”

I did, but the power system was running flawlessly. Watching Kyle run the MWD was much more fun. It had been too much to hope for him to actually let me run the machine myself. Only a licensed MWD engineer could do that, someone with a PhD in Macro Quantum Physics, which Kyle had. To him I was just some engineer.

I’d been watching Kyle all day, and I pretty much could see what he was doing. Find the anchor, locate your temporal zone in relation to the anchor, get within a few thousand years, calibrate, recalibrate, repeat until you find the right time. Then do the same with the X-Y-Z coordinates. I couldn’t see why you needed a PhD to do it.

“So how do we know our universe isn’t one that someone else made?” I asked.

Kyle shook his head. “Dr. Skillingstead proved that we’re the primary universe using a Copenhagen variant —”

My phone beeped and he frowned as I ignored his explanation and answered it.

“Hello?”

“It’s Beth. Is the 7500 BC probe ready yet?”

“Kyle’s taking his sweet old time calibrating the spatial locator.”

He glared at me. “Do you want it over Panama or Greece?” he growled.

“I’ll call you when he’s done.”

“Thanks.”

“How about dinner?”

“No.” She hung up. At least she didn’t file a memo.

Kyle smirked. I don’t know why; I’d seen his Frankenstein’s girlfriend. I didn’t know if he’d picked her up in a bar or built her in the lab. Better for Beth to reject me than to date the greasy-haired grad student from Hell.

“Why can’t this be done robotically?” I asked. “I mean, do we really need a PhD to run this thing?” Yes, I was baiting him.

“Maybe one day, this can all be done automatically. But if we blow a calibration, we black out a whole time zone. I don’t think Dr. Elk would be happy with that.”

That was for sure. His schedule was exacting. And once you closed a hole in a time zone, there was no going back. The future in a new universe was like Schroedinger’s cat, alive or dead until you opened the box. But once you closed a hole and moved forward, you couldn’t go back, since it never happened. Only the unknown future was open.

7500 BC was where we were going to drop the modern maize. Then every one hundred years we’d drop in spyeyes to track the propagation. By 1500 CE, the Americas should be as much a power house as the Europeans. Perhaps the Aztecs would discover the Old World.

They just needed a little help.