Elsewhere, page 12
Nevertheless, she would try hard to remember that the heart was deceitful. She would make every effort to be smart about the risk associated with the key to everything and respectful of Daddy’s counsel.
When she found herself staring at the device as it lay there on the table, she realized that her father was watching her, that she would promise never to use the key, that he would both believe her and doubt her, that she would be ashamed of the heart’s yearning she couldn’t repress, that he would be aware of her shame and know it was perhaps insufficient to ensure her obedience.
The relationship between a father and daughter was humongously complex, as delicate as it was strong, in some ways as unsettling as it was wonderful.
She could only dimly imagine how complicated, how demanding and fulfilling, would be their relationship when they were not just a family of two, but a family of three, intact.
32
When the owner of the house came home from work and found the dead thing in the upstairs hall, 911 had dispatched officers in answer to her call. The police had phoned John Falkirk, and he had relieved them of jurisdiction.
Constance Yardley, the homeowner, was a fifty-year-old English teacher. Falkirk didn’t like her. She was a throwback to a time when teachers had spines like drill sergeants. She taught in a private school where disciplinarians like her could still crack a kid’s knuckles with a ruler and openly berate a lazy student and even issue failing grades, yet be at no risk of losing her job. He left her in a book-lined study with two of his men. She seemed perceptive enough to understand that her guards were guys who’d grown up taking no shit from anyone and that she was well advised to speak to them in a soft, conciliatory voice.
Blood, brains, splinters of bone, and twists of hair spattered a portion of the upstairs hallway floor, a swath of one wall, and a small part of the ceiling. The bullet entered under the creature’s chin and exited through the high arc of the parietal bone.
Two agents waited at the head of the stairs, but Falkirk was alone with the corpse of the Bestpet. Such creatures were called Bestpets on six of the known worlds where science was more advanced than on Earth Prime and where a corporation, partly with government funding, harnessed the technology to create them. In three other timelines, Bestpets were called Geezenstacks.
Before Edwin Harkenbach had gone rogue, 187 Earths had been visited as part of Project Everett Highways, which was named after Hugh Everett III, the Princeton physicist who first posited the existence of parallel universes in 1957. In addition to Harkenbach, twenty-six men and women had voyaged across the multiverse during the first phase of the project, all of them anthropologists and biologists and their ilk, science types whom Falkirk used like tools but whom he found tedious. One died in an accident. Five were killed in violent encounters on gone-wrong worlds that crawled with hellish horrors. In Falkirk’s estimation, the discoveries they made were worth the lives of a thousand like them. Ten thousand.
They had all worn disguised body cams, so Falkirk had seen Bestpets like the one that had been killed here. The project’s video archives offered uncountable strange sights, some far more hideous than this bioengineered monstrosity, but also others that were exhilarating, inspiring.
The answers to all Earth Prime’s problems were to be found on the infinite other versions of the planet, along Everett Highways. Worlds existed on which civilization was less impressive than here on Prime, but there were others on which science and medicine were more advanced. By harvesting knowledge from the latter, pollution and pestilence and disease could be eliminated.
Better yet, anyone who recovered highly advanced science and technology from parallel timelines and brought it to this one would be richer than any king or oligarch in history.
There were also worlds where cultures and social structures and politics had developed along pathways never followed—in some cases, never even conceived—here on Prime. These alternatives offered ways to effect progressive change, to remake America into a more orderly and more industrious nation, especially when combined with behavior-altering drugs and biological mechanisms that had been developed in those many elsewheres.
Phase one of the project—exploration—should have led to phase two. Exploration would have continued, with new worlds being visited regularly, but the harvesting of valuable science and technology already discovered would also have been pursued.
Unfortunately, infuriatingly, Edwin Harkenbach proved to have principles that he took seriously, as if Earth Prime wasn’t already moving past his primitive ideas of right, wrong, and self-restraint. Whether gradually or in a moment of sudden enlightenment, Harkenbach realized that gaining ultimate power was a key purpose of Falkirk’s and of the political elites who ensured the funding of Everett’s Highways. He rebelled.
If Ed had chosen to argue his case with those who financed his work, or if he had gone to the FBI under the illusion that federal law enforcement wasn’t corrupt, or if he had been foolish enough to trust the media to help him blow the whistle, he would be dead by now. There was a point where he could have been stopped, and the project could have flourished without him.
Instead, he’d been cunning enough to forego those options in favor of sabotage. There had once been three transport devices, which Harkenbach had called “the keys to everything.” He destroyed two of them and obliterated every bit of data, in computers and in the cloud, related to the design of the keys.
Only when Ed disappeared with the third key did it become clear that the combined knowledge of his entire staff was insufficient to create new transport devices. The tricky sonofabitch had left his closest associates under the impression that they knew everything about how the keys functioned. In fact, during the year Harkenbach had been on the run, all those geniuses working together feverishly had made no progress toward restarting operations.
Falkirk answered to one of the most powerful political families in the nation, particularly to the senator who was the current flag carrier for that fabled tribe and who knew all the corrupt means by which the shadow state could be used to do what the elite preferred rather than what the American people wanted. Falkirk also answered to a consortium of billionaires, domestic and foreign, who provided capital when money couldn’t always secretly, safely be drained from other government programs to finance Everett’s Highways. None of these people blamed Falkirk for Harkenbach’s treachery, but they were not happy with him, either.
If he could find the rogue scientist, Falkirk had a pharmacy of chemicals and cutting-edge technology with which to drain from the old man all the knowledge needed to make new transport devices. Or if he was able to locate the one remaining key, the project team could reverse engineer it and get operations moving again.
Some of Falkirk’s superiors thought Harkenbach had remained at large because he was able to decamp to another world every time that those searching for him got close. In that other reality, he could travel to another state or even another country before returning to Prime, far removed from the place where he’d almost been captured.
Falkirk felt certain that was not the case. During the first year that multiverse travel had become possible, before he had gone rogue, Ed Harkenbach had visited many alternate realities—and he had become increasingly alarmed about the horrors some of them offered, the gruesome traps into which even a cautious traveler could step, the threats to civilization that might inadvertently be brought back to Prime. Believing that using the key involved as much moral as existential risk, he had stopped traveling a month before he went on the run. Yes, for whatever reason, he’d taken the one remaining key, but even though it was his life’s work and proof of his genius, an in-depth psychological profile concluded that he would destroy it before he would use it.
Falkirk figured he had maybe three or four months to favorably resolve the situation. If he failed, he would lose the patronage of the widely esteemed senator and the senator’s fashionable family, and he would not likely get a job ever again in the moneyed swamps of Washington.
That would be the least of his problems.
He knew far too much. In addition to being fired, he would have a mortal accident or a killer stroke, or be shot in the back of the head by a robber, or be assisted into a convincing suicide.
Now he called to the two men—Canker and Wong—waiting at the head of the stairs. When they joined him, he said, “Bag the monkey-boy’s corpse, take it away, and burn it.”
“So you want a bleach crew to clean up the rest of the mess?” Canker asked, surveying the spray pattern of biological debris.
“Hell, no,” Falkirk said. “We aren’t a fucking janitorial service.”
He went downstairs to deal with Constance Yardley. She reminded him of a teacher, Mrs. Holt, from his boarding school days, twenty-six years ago. Mrs. Holt, that sarcastic bitch, had tortured him with past participles and the subjunctive mood and parallel sentence structure. As a boy, he’d had erotic dreams in which she was naked and he broke her fingers with a hammer and cut her extensively.
33
While her father sat at the kitchen table, continuing to pore through Spooky Ed’s book, Amity prepared a dinner salad of butter lettuce, beefsteak tomatoes, black olives, and chopped peperoncinis, topped with chunks of Havarti cheese. There was a large sausage pizza in the freezer, and dark chocolate ice cream with orange swirls for dessert. Comfort food in the comfort of home.
As much as Amity loved their bungalow, it didn’t feel all that comfortable at the moment. For one thing, she kept listening for the clatter of helicopters. And she couldn’t stop thinking how much warmer these rooms would be if the right Michelle lived here.
Amity knew that the heart was deceitful above all things, but she also knew that the heart was a lonely hunter, that the heart was slow to learn, that the heart was an open house with its doors widely flung. Because she’d read enough books to bring an elephant to its knees if they were stacked on its back, and because writers had so much to say about the human heart, she knew a gajillion truths about the heart, many of them in conflict with one another. When a girl was racing toward her twelfth birthday, life was confusing enough without the complication of parallel worlds.
After putting aside the book, her father pressed his fingers to his eyes as if what he read made them ache. “He doesn’t say anything about a key to everything let alone about batteries to power it. But if I understand what he’s saying about something called the ‘quantum wave’ or the ‘de Broglie-Schrödinger electron wave,’ Ed thought that any method of traveling across the multiverse could be continuously powered by radiation emitted by the electrons in this wave when they aren’t constrained in Bohr orbits, whatever the hell that means.”
Putting the big bowl of salad in the refrigerator to keep it chilled and crisp, Amity said, “I found Mom’s recipes in a ring binder. You haven’t cooked any of those meals in a couple years.”
“Ed says time travel will never be possible. We don’t live in just space or time. We live in space-time. The only constant speed of anything in the universe, the only reliable scale, is the speed of light—186,282 miles per second. So it’s also the speed of time. If you’re in a chair reading a book, in one hour you’ve traveled over 670 million miles in space-time. Imagine trying to turn a car around at such a speed. Momentum makes it impossible. There is no brake on light, on time. You can’t stop and go back. And because you can’t go faster than light, you can’t speed ahead to the future. But it’s possible to go sideways.”
“Her recipe for vegetable-beef soup looks really good,” Amity said as she took the pizza from the freezer. “It’s easy enough. If I had all the ingredients, I could make that. I’ve never had her soup. Wouldn’t it be nice to have Mom’s soup for dinner one night, just as though she was here and made it and was at the table with us?”
Picking up the book once more and paging through it, her father said, “Here’s a bit that worries me. The positions of subatomic particles aren’t fixed. They exist in a cloud of possibilities. At the very base of matter, everything in the universe is always in flux, as are the infinite universes in relationship to one another. You know what I think maybe that means?”
Putting the frozen pizza on a baking tray, Amity said, “The oven’s hot, so this’ll be done in like twenty minutes. It’s past dinnertime, and I’m starving. Can you take a break to eat?”
“What I think it means is, the routes to those hundred eighty-seven worlds cataloged in the key are only approximate directions. Things change. So if they change enough . . . maybe you don’t end up where you wanted to go. Maybe you arrive between universes, if there is such a place. In a vacuum. In a void. Dead on arrival.”
Sliding the tray into the oven, Amity said, “Have you heard anything I’ve said?”
He looked at her. “Recipes in a ring binder, Michelle’s vegetable-beef soup, maybe make it yourself, but pizza tonight, dinner in twenty minutes. Did you hear anything I said?”
“Quantum wave, no battery, the speed of light, forget time travel, go sideways, a vacuum, a void, dead on arrival.”
He smiled, and so did she, and he said, “We’re always on the same page, aren’t we?”
“You can close the book on that,” she said.
He closed the book and pointed to the key to everything. “Maybe I should mix up a barrelful of cement right after dinner, sink that gismo in it, and take it out to sea.”
“Bad idea, Dad. We might need it if that Falkirk guy comes around again. Remember?”
“But we’re in way over our heads, Amity. We shouldn’t have this thing.”
Bringing plates to the table, she said, “Have you wondered why Ed gave it to you?”
“I’ve wondered until I’m sick of wondering.”
“He liked you.”
“So he pulls the pin on a hand grenade and gives it to me.”
“The gismo isn’t that dangerous,” she said.
“It’s more dangerous than a grenade.”
“It’s his life’s work.”
“His life’s work will get us killed.”
“He couldn’t bring himself to destroy his life’s work. You can understand that.”
Jeffy looked at her, his life’s work.
Amity said, “So he trusted you to keep it safe.”
“He shouldn’t have trusted me.”
“He shouldn’t have trusted anyone else but you.”
“I’m no hero, sweetheart.”
“True heroes never think they are. I mean, holy guacamole, how many times have we read that story?”
Regarding the key to everything with trepidation, he said, “Maybe with what the bullet did to its face, Good Boy will seem to be just a chimp in a costume, somebody’s creepy pet. Maybe the cops won’t look too close at it. Maybe they won’t think it’s weird enough to call in the feds. Maybe we’ll never see Falkirk again.”
Amity didn’t know what math to use to calculate the probability that all those maybes would be fulfilled.
With her father, in silence, she stared at the so-called key. The darn thing had an aura about it that drew the eye. Even if you didn’t know what it did, you’d have known in your bones that some terrible power coiled in it, evil magic . . . but maybe some good magic, too, if you used it for the right purpose. It seemed to have a sorcerous glimmer akin to that of the One Ring, the Master of all Rings, that had been made in Mordor and which could be destroyed only by returning it to the fire where it was forged.
After a while, she said, “I’ll check on the pizza.”
34
Slender and shapely, Constance Yardley appeared younger than fifty, and Falkirk found her attractive, which was odd considering that she was an English teacher. She had the attitude of superiority common to all English teachers in his experience, especially the female ones, who thought they were hot stuff just because they knew everything about subordinate adverb clauses and dangling modifiers. The condescension with which their kind regarded him usually made them ugly in his eyes, even repulsive.
In fact, in his experience, a significant percentage of women, not just English teachers, thought they were too special for words. Yardley had such an exalted opinion of herself that she expected you to kiss her ass and thank her for the privilege.
Earlier, she’d sat on the sofa in her book-lined study, acting patient and mannerly, but he had seen through her act. He’d seen her veiled arrogance, her snotty disapproval, the contempt that was as much a part of her as the marrow in her bones.
She reminded him not just of the English teacher that had most tormented and mocked him in boarding school, but also of his hateful stepmother, Katarina, who had gotten her hands on his father’s crank shortly after his mother died. Kat quickly pumped out two brats of her own by the time Falkirk was thirteen and screwed the old man into a massive heart attack. She dispatched her stepson to boarding school and methodically stripped him of his inheritance.
Now, when Falkirk returned to the study from the upstairs hallway, Yardley had moved from the sofa to the chair behind her desk, where she sat with a book of at least five hundred pages. Wearing half-lens reading glasses, she made notes on a lined tablet. No doubt her cursive would be as precise as that of a machine, and every damn comma would be exactly where it was supposed to be.
