Parallelities (23 page)

An unexpected euphoria filled his mind and thoughts. No matter what the universe around him chose to do, he was still him, still Maxwell Parker. Nothing could change that. Not the presence of grisly, ravenous carnivores or unnatural quadruplet beauties or even a world populated entirely by several billion versions of himself.

I am me
, he decided,
because nobody else is. Nobody else can be me.
To paraphrase a well-known saying: No matter where I am, there I is. As a writer he hated to resort to paraphrasing, but that was as much a part of him as the fine car and beach apartment and as yet unrealized ambitions. Cobbled together, lumped as a whole, they combined to make up the one, the only, the original Max Parker.

It was a good feeling to be once more assured of himself.

Why
not
an infinitude of possible paras? Why
not
one for everybody, in addition to the infinite multiplicity of shared
worlds? Let us have a para just for the kindly Konigsberg, and for the recently married lovebirds he had encountered in the garage. A perpetually grumpy one for the irascible Kryzewski, and one of voluptuous innocence for the curvaceous Omaha sisters. One for Alanis Morisette, in which thoughtful lyrics ruled, and another for the committed disciples of dear, departed Havergal Brian and his music too overwhelming for the curmudgeonly conservative cognoscenti, a para in which thirty-two symphonies ruled and “Prometheus Unbound” had not been lost.

Worlds enough for everyone, and time. Paras uncountable as the stars in the sky, paras enough to make a pinch of all the sands on all the beaches of the world. Paras unbounding, so that anything that could be imagined was possible; paras sufficient to make the unimagined a reality.

Quadrillions upon quadrillions of paras, piled upon and beneath and side by side one another in a macrocosmic volume wherein a single universe was but a pinprick.

Not for the first time was it all too much for his mind to cope with, too much even for a legion of para Einsteins to come to grips with. For that matter, imagine a world inhabited by nothing but para Einsteins, he thought. What a world that must be! Genius truly triumphant—or else a world filled with millions of multiple versions of real dreamers endlessly dreaming their dreams of other universes while nobody did the cooking or the cleaning or the washing-up. It would be a disheveled, badly dressed world, to boot.

He did not need Utopia. The threat of disease and brush-fire wars and too much poverty existing side by side with the super-rich and inane television programming and homogenized fast food and carjackings he could handle. But he could no longer deal with a Fate that indulged in repeated hijackings of reality. His reality. Hell and dammit, the novelty had worn off. He had to do something.

The first consisting of forcing himself to think in simpler terms.
One para at a time
, he ordered himself.
Focus on the here and now and don’t try to make sense of the distant and tomorrow. Minute by minute does the trick. Next, find something to focus on. Something to rivet the mind, limit the scope of perception to what can be immediately comprehended.

As it turned out, that was less difficult to do than at first it seemed.

Boles.

S
taring grim-faced over the wheel, he roared up the access street and out onto Ocean Avenue, ignoring the angry bleats of drivers he cut off and those who were forced to slam on their brakes to avoid crashing into him. The Aurora sped down onto the Pacific Coast Highway, accelerating as it turned northward and elbowing aside lesser vehicles. Max was the recipient of murderous stares from other drivers that he single-mindedly ignored. Having already dealt with monstrous tentacled shapes from other worlds, subtle variations on Armageddon, blighted scenes of terrestrial destruction, aliens, ghosts, and assorted other para phenomena, he was not about to be disturbed or even distracted by the comical, angry gestures of bellicose commuters on their way home from work.

By now the patience of his editor was likely to have run out, but Max did not care. His job no longer mattered to him. Nothing
mattered except terminating the Boles Effect and getting himself snapped back to his own para line. If that was even possible now, he found himself wondering. Like a ship whose engine had died at sea, he was adrift, floating across parallel worlds, riding a crest one moment and plunging into apocalyptic troughs the next. His greatest fear was that he might have drifted too far to find his way back, even if the Effect suddenly evanesced. He only hoped that if that was the case and he found himself permanently attached to a para different from his own, it would be one that was more or less benign.

Either way, he fully intended to survive. He had learned how to do that much, anyway.

As if determined to discourage him, the field in which he was unwillingly embedded showed signs of strengthening. The world around him seemed to shift and flow even as he drove up the coast, reality melting and coalescing like some great cosmic pudding in which he was the sole, lonely raisin.

The ocean vanished, to be replaced by a heaving mass of pale pink flesh from which massive, lugubrious bubbles slowly rose and burst. Each time one erupted, a burst of discordant music filled the air. People and animals still lined the beach, gazing contentedly out to where the sea had been. Cats listened intently to the pulsating pink chorus side by side with humans, and bears and coatimundis shared aural space with sunning sheep and monkeys dressed in shorts, vests, and wrap-around sunglasses. Jaw set, lips tight, Max kept his eyes on the road and drove on.

The crumbling sandstone cliffs of the Palisades, familiar to him from hundreds of trips up the coast, had vanished. In their place a long stone wall stretched from north to south as far as the eye could see, the endless rampart interrupted only by occasional towers and redoubts. He was no longer in the Aurora but on the back of a chariot drawn by three white horses, whipped along by a charioteer while he sat, petrified and disoriented, on the seat behind.

From the direction of the sea rose the commingled howling of half a million throats. Rushing toward the wall in an unbroken line a half mile wide came the Golden Horde, thundering over the desert that had previously been the sea on foot and on horseback.

Their terrifying battle cry was met by a roar of thunderous defiance from the tens of thousands of armored defenders who lined the crest of the immense wall. A hail of arrows and heavy spears began to fly from the parapets to fall with devastating effect on the berserking attackers. The martial pealing of drums and bugle-like horns rose above the shrieks and cries and humanoid bellowing.

Abruptly and without warning, the rattling chariot vanished and he was back in the enclosed metal womb of the Aurora. As he grabbed frantically for the steering wheel, one bronze-tipped spear grazed the passenger’s side of the sedan’s windshield, crazing the glass. Mouth set, Max didn’t even wince. Ignoring the fact that he was driving down the rapidly shrinking divide between two onrushing, opposing armies of
monstrous size and murderous intent, he continued to barrel up the wide dirt road that the Pacific Coast Highway had become.

The Golden Horde winked out of existence, the impossible Great Wall of Santa Monica disappeared as cleanly as if deleted from a computer screen. He was back on paved road, the friendly dark surface marred by familiar cracks and potholes and white striping. It didn’t matter. He paid it no more attention than if it had transformed into one of the rings of Saturn and he was cruising along toward distant Triton at seventy miles per. His thoughts were focused not on place but on one man. Barrington Boles was the single coherent entity around which his existence now orbited, and it was to Barrington Boles that he was fleeing as fast as heavy horsepower could carry him.

He couldn’t even kill the son of a bitch, Max thought bluntly, because he might end up killing the right son of a bitch. But it was a pleasing thought, and the protracted contemplation of assorted forms of homicide helped to pass the time as he continued up the coast.

Perhaps the worst of it was that, if he survived physically and mentally, the likelihood of extracting a story from his experiences was much reduced. Readers of tabloids like the
Investigator
were usually confused by any science more complicated than that necessary to explain the workings of a cheese grater. As a consequence, even adventurous editors tended to shy away from stories about the space program or new developments in computers or even mass consumer electronics—
unless they involved kidnapping aliens or secret government plots or new ways to lose weight, or Elvis.

Leaving Santa Monica and L.A. proper behind, he began winding his way along the base of the mountains, speeding past sun-bronzed surfers and flabby families and students from UCLA playing hooky. Much to his relief, none of them looked the least like him. The sky did not turn red, or purple, or polka-dot. The road did not metamorphose into the back of a giant, writhing snake. No little men, green or otherwise, materialized in the seat next to him, and no alien spaceships disgorged the bemused citizens of other worlds onto the increasingly rocky beach. With his window down, the damp rushing air that poured into the car smelled of salt and sea and rock and festering hydrocarbons. It stank, in fact, of reality.

He would not let himself believe, would not allow himself to accept. He had been burned by a chortling cosmos too many times already.

But the guard at the gated compound was one he remembered, and who in turn recognized him, waving him through with a sprightly California good-afternoon. Iceplant defined the limits of large yards, gluing the uncertain hillsides together with clutches of spiky, defiant greenery. He saw nothing more outré than a wandering poodle with a punk coiffure.

Boles’s manse was exactly as he remembered it. A gardener was just leaving, the bed of his battered, dented pickup filled to capacity with bush and tree trimmings. He waved as
the emotionally exhausted Max pulled into the circular driveway and parked, not even bothering to take his keys.

As before, Boles answered his own door. It looked like Boles, sounded like Boles, acted and talked like Boles. The overriding and all-important question was—was it the correct Boles? Was this the right reality, or one sufficiently subtly different to permit the existence of a Boles who did not have a clue as to how his addlepated work had distorted the true nature of the universe?

“Hi,” Boles said jauntily. “It’s not Tuesday yet.”

Silently, Max thanked whatever god or gods was looking over him at that moment. “I won’t last till Tuesday.” Without waiting for an invitation, he stepped past the older man and into the house.

His expression becoming one of honest concern, Boles shut the door and followed the reporter into the front room. “You don’t look so good, Max. This has been hard on you, hasn’t it?”

“HARD?” Max counted to three—he did not have patience enough to wait till ten—and forced himself to stay calm. “Hard. Look at me, Boles. Since the last time we met I’ve been slipping in and out of parallel worlds like lead shot through Jell-O. I barely know who I am anymore, much less where I am.” Pacing the room, he extended his arms in a posture of helpless supplication.

“Take right now, this moment, for instance. How do I
know this is my world and not some para? How do I know that you’re my Barrington Boles? How can you be sure that I’m not some para Max Parker? How can anybody be sure of anything?”

The inventor made soothing noises. “Take it easy.”

“Yeah, sure; take it easy.” Moody and depressed, Max threw himself down onto the couch, bouncing a couple of times as he landed. “Easy for you to say. It doesn’t matter to you what I am because you know for sure that this is your world. You possess a certainty that’s denied to me.” He looked up, his gaze desperate and searching.

“It’s amazing the things we take for granted, Barrington. The reality of the world around us, the stability, the knowledge that what we go to bed with tonight will in all probability be there when we wake up in the morning. You lose that and it doesn’t matter how successful you are or how rich or how healthy. Lose your reality and everything starts to come loose, to fall apart. Even if it’s a better reality than the one you’re used to, and I visited one or two of those, you never manage to quite fit in.” He grabbed a handful of mixed nuts from a glass dish on the coffee table and began munching them nervously.

“Let me tell you something, Barry. Shifting realities and parallel worlds suck. I just thought that, as an anticipative scientist, you ought to know that.”

Boles did his best to commiserate. “I’m not sure how to quantify that observation as empirical data, but it’s nice to have the opinion of someone who’s been there.”

Unmollified, Max fidgeted on the couch, too edgy to sit still. “Been there, done that. Been lots of wheres, done plenty of things. And I’m sick of it, Boles. Sick and tired of it. I want my own world back, my own para. I want to get up in my own bed, by myself, and drive to work, and write amusing stories about mildly outrageous incidents in the lives of ordinary citizens without becoming an outrageous incident myself.” He leaned forward and his tone turned dead earnest.

“Give me back my reality, Barrington. I want it back. I need it back. Take the Boles Effect and bury it someplace quiet where it won’t be found. It’s dangerous. It’s destabilizing. It makes a man inclined to do violent, unpleasant things to inventors they hardly know who monkey around with the fabric of the universe without a clear vision of what they’re getting other people into.”

The two men stared into each other’s eyes for a long moment. Then Boles announced quietly, “I’ve been working on the problem.”

“You found a way to kill the field,” Max shot back instantly.

“Well, I’m not sure.” The inventor rubbed at his chin. “I haven’t been sure about quite a lot since I started this project—but then, you already know that. But I’ve been working on it.”

“Great,” Max muttered, his hands working against one another. “I’m losing my mind, and you’re ‘working on it.’”

The inventor was eyeing him thoughtfully. “I wonder if
you
are
in the right para? I mean, I
know
that I’m the right Barrington Boles, but I wonder if you’re the right Maxwell Parker. Just as you said, you could be another Max entirely who just happened to wander into this para by mistake. If so, and I help you and everything works, that means I might be marooning the real Max Parker in some other para forever.”

“Screw the other Max Parkers!” The reporter’s tone was choleric. “If you don’t do something to end this for me then you’ll have at least one angry maniac on your hands for sure.
That’s
something you don’t have to speculate on.”

Boles dug tiredly at his eyes and spoke thoughtfully. “You
talk
like the Max Parker I know, anyway.”

The reporter laughed hollowly. “Wouldn’t all the different mes talk alike?”

“Not necessarily. If the paras you say you’ve been slipping and sliding between are so different, the Max Parkers that inhabit them might speak and act differently as well. The differences would be subtle, but they would be real.” He continued to concentrate speculatively on his visitor.

After a little of this Max began to grow uneasy. “What are you staring at?”

“I told you. I’m trying to decide if you’re the real Max Parker, the original.”

Max found himself nodding slowly. “That’s exactly what I’d expect the original Barrington Boles to say. One who was familiar with the success of his machine. The other Boleses I
met were familiar with the theory but hadn’t succeeded in making the device work.”

“Fascinating. I wish I could meet some of my paras.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Barrington. It’s pretty damn interesting to be able to sit down and have a conversation with yourself, but it’s no way to live. No matter what para you find yourself in, you’re always better off in the one that you belong to. I found that out.” He rose from the couch. “You said that you’ve been working on the problem.”

Boles nodded. “Personally, I think it’s premature to try using the equipment to negate the effect, but if you’re that desperate…”

“Barry, I’m beyond desperate. I’m going out of my mind. As if going out of my reality wasn’t bad enough. If you think there’s a chance, even a small chance, of doing anything, then for God’s sake let’s take a shot at it. No matter what happens, it can’t be any worse than what I’m going through now.”