“Seventy-thirty,” she said. “I still… I don’t know.”
“It’s not that unbelievable. We know we were completely bounced out of our own space and time. Why not to a whole other universe?”
“But what does it mean, to be in a seventy-thirty universe?”
“I have a guess. In our experiments we saw that the crest in the wave correlated to a positive force and the trough to a negative one—which you could call ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ If life on Earth is a balance of good and evil—fifty-fifty—that means this planet, and probably the entire universe we’re in, seventy percent good or creative impulse and thirty percent evil or destructive impulse.”
“It’s still hard for me to accept that Earth is fifty percent ‘evil,’ “ Jill debated, with an impatient shake of her head. “That’s certainly not my experience of it. And will you quit playing with those things? They could be dangerous.”
Nate grinned sheepishly and put the metal capsules back in his pocket. “Why? Things decay and die, don’t they? Who is it that said, ‘What’s not busy being born is busy dying’?”
“Nixon.”
Nate gave a huffing laugh. “Anyway, all you have to do is look at our history. Most of it’s been a bloodbath, including the twentieth century. What about Hitler? Nagasaki? Vietnam? The Khmer Rouge? Bosnia? And it’s not just man—it’s nature, too. ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’? By all accounts the dinosaurs had a pretty vicious existence before they were wiped out permanently. In fact, most species become extinct.”
“That’s true, but…”
“I know; I know. Our life seems cush. But we have a warped perspective. We happen to live—ha! we lived—in a particularly benign place and time on Earth. But even so, even though modern Americans aren’t being overrun by Huns or living in fear of plague or the Inquisition, are most people living a life of ease? Hardly. We invent more and more ‘stuff’ and gadgets and mindless entertainment, yet everyone I know is stressed. People have to put their kids through sixteen years of expensive education and continue to reeducate themselves as adults. We have to maintain our cars and houses and all our ‘stuff,’ get groceries, feed the kids, pay the bills, worry about retirement, yadda, yadda, yadda. Meanwhile there’s the IRS, mental illness, heart disease, AIDS, cancer, terrorist threats, stock market crashes, and school shoot-outs. Which explains why so many guys drop dead in their fifties from heart attacks. So even we Americans can’t escape the law of fifty-fifty.”
Jill looked at him in disbelief. “Where do you get this stuff? You’re a carefree student.”
Nate waggled his eyebrows. “I have six older siblings, remember?”
“Well, my life isn’t that complicated—wasn’t that complicated. Back on Earth, I mean. You can make the decision not to have life be that complicated.”
“Yeah, you can be single and not have kids. But what are you giving up on the flip side? Because I think that’s the point. No matter what choices we make to try to make life easy for ourselves, there’s always something negative or some challenge on the new path. You can’t escape it. That’s the law of good and evil.”
Jill grimaced, face set stubbornly. “I don’t agree. There is no disadvantage to being childless for me.”
“Sure there is. It’s just that you, as an individual, don’t put much value on the positive aspects of having kids. Nor are you particularly worried about the negative aspects of not having kids. But let’s look at the issue from a completely dispassionate point of view.”
Jill shrugged.
“Okay. So having kids—here’s on the good side: nurturing, mentoring, love, having a family around you, passing on your genes—”
Jill snorted. “A: they’re not that great as genes go. B: there are too many people on the planet already.”
“Fine. That’s your opinion. We’re just listing pros and cons, remember? On the negative side of having kids there’s the loss of personal time and space, the financial burden, the limitations on lifestyle, the ‘exasperation factor’ of dealing with a child all the time—”
“Exactly.”
“So you, personally, are more afraid of the negative stuff than you value the positive stuff. But for someone who gets off on being nurturing or really can’t imagine life without a big family, it might be the other way around. But objectively, having kids is equal amounts reward and shit factor. In fact, I would say that, as with anything, the bigger the rewards, the bigger the shit factor. That’s how fifty-fifty land works. And not having kids is equally good and bad. It’s just a different set of gotchas.”
Jill folded her arms defensively as she walked. “What’s negative about not having kids?”
“You don’t get all the good stuff about having kids for starters, all the nurturing, family stuff. Plus, don’t you want someone to take care of you when you’re old?”
“If I can’t take care of myself, I’d rather not hang around, frankly.”
“Really?” Nate gave her an appraising look. “Okay, what about this: I remember my mother talking about my great-aunt. She was a ripe old bitch and Mom said it was because she’d never had kids, never learned how to have patience or put someone other than herself first. Without love in her life she just sort of hardened up. Emotions are like a muscle—use ’em or lose ’em. Kids definitely make you use ’em.”
Jill shrugged indifferently, but a knot of pain flared in her chest. He had aimed that barb at her personally, and it was pretty damn cruel.
For a moment she said nothing. Then, because she didn’t want him to know how much he’d hurt her, she asked, “I assume this theory of yours has other examples?”
He shrugged, jiggling those capsules around in his hand. “Of course. Everything is fifty-fifty. Take flying, for example. Airplanes introduced a fast way to travel to just about anywhere on Earth. That’s an amazing benefit compared to what our ancestors had. But it’s never that simply good, huh-uh. Now we have all of the great cities, like in Europe, and all the most beautiful islands, like Greece, so packed with tourists that you can’t even enjoy them anymore. People hijack planes and use them as weapons or target them with missiles. And the airport scene has gotten increasingly intolerable. There’s also the little fact that although planes crash very rarely, when they do, your chances of survival are nil. In fact, that’s kind of an interesting point. It’s almost like because planes crash infrequently when they do it has to be catastrophic, as if the badness of the bad, when it happens, has to be so bad that it still balances out all the good.”
“But planes are incredibly convenient!”
“Of course. So we invent stuff like that, trying to make life convenient. But there’s always stuff that comes with it that we don’t like, because nothing can be purely good.”
“But how can you deny that life on Earth is a whole lot better now than it was in the Middle Ages? If everything stays fifty-fifty, by law, how would anything ever progress?”
Nate considered it. “But it progresses because it’s fifty-fifty, because we always try to make things better, but we never actually get there. I mean, that’s how evolution works, right? I do see your point, though. Things may be better for us, overall, than they were for our cave-dwelling ancestors. It may be that things gradually improve over time, even if it’s still fifty-fifty. You know, more like the entire graph shifts upward in tiny increments.”