She gaped at me. “Well, yes I did, now that you mention it. When I was in the second year of my master’s program, and thinking about going into Reich Studies, I was pretty broke and I applied to the intelligence services. They didn’t want me as an analyst but they offered me the chance to take the physical qualifier. Then I got a decent job, and dropped out and worked for a year, so I never went back to schedule the qualifier. I suppose if I hadn’t gotten that job just then, I might have taken the test and become a spy or a policeman or something, and learned all about using guns and knives.” She got up, gulped her wine, and went to stare out the window at the dark. “That was it, wasn’t it? Some little turning point in my life where I didn’t become the woman who was so good with a gun two nights ago. But then how did she show up just then, and why am I here? My memory includes you getting shot, Lyle, and I think you did. Or some of you did.”
There was a long, awkward silence, and then Helen began to cry, collapsing back onto the couch in a big, awkward tangle of limbs. “You know,” she said, “I have a horrible feeling that somewhere out there you’re dead, and I’m crying. And it doesn’t seem fair, because the me that killed Billie Beard saved your life, and she probably doesn’t have you. She could be the one crying. And it seems so unfair that I’ve still got you, and I didn’t do a thing—”
I got up and took her in my arms, and started kissing away tears and trying to soothe her, as I suppose lovers have been doing for upset lovers since the world began. Her wet face pressed against my neck, and then her soft lips began to move against my skin, and whether it was just stress, or a desperate need to reassure each other, or even just that we had been planning to make love anyway, that’s what we did.
Later, as we were lying in bed, waiting to drift off, I said, “Here’s an odd observation. Does it seem to you that people don’t talk about the past nearly as much as they used to? I mean, I notice nowadays that when small children begin to talk about what happened last year or last month, their mothers shush them as if they’d talked about bowel movements or their private parts. I don’t remember that when I was a child, do you?”
“No, come to think of it.” She rolled over and rested her head on my chest. “And I think I never bring the subject up, not because it would be impolite, but because I just don’t. Now and then some older person starts to talk about their life or things they saw or did long ago, and I find I always get very impatient and try to avoid hearing it. Isn’t that strange in a historian? And my memory is going, too. Every lecture, I go to the library and look up things I know by heart before I write that lecture. Isn’t it strange that I never noticed any of that before?”
“Strange, or maybe part of the pattern,” I said. “Which we seem to be getting better and better at talking about—we’re having fewer memory lapses and seizures, or whatever those were. As if practicing somehow makes it possible to think about the problem.”
“I wonder how many other people wandered in from how many other worlds,” Helen said.
“Other worlds?” I asked. Then I got a blinding headache and passed out.
A moment later I woke up, my head still in pain, with Helen holding me and saying, “Here, take an aspirin. Are you all right?”
“I guess so. What happened to you when you said ‘other worlds?’ ” At the phrase, my stomach lurched and my head hurt.
“Nothing when I said it. I thought it a moment before, and felt sort of dizzy. Which makes me think it’s one of those ideas, like, like, like, the ones we couldn’t speak before. Well, then, all right, many of us are from different versions of the past...” She gasped. “Ooh, now there’s a thought that hurt. Which I guess is our indicator that it’s important. Not many of us. We all are.”
I swallowed the aspirin and said, “The thought didn’t hurt me because I don’t understand what you are getting at. But now I’m really, really curious.”
She drew a deep breath and said, “All right, here’s the thought. Suppose people are crossing from one history to another—all the histories are sort of tangled together like spaghetti, all right? And most of the time, when you cross over, you cross over to a strand very near your own, so only small details are different—like how you met, or how long your cat lived, or something. But every so often you accidentally take a big leap, like I did when I came here to this history. And whatever causes those crossovers, the crossovers have been getting more and more frequent in the recent past, so that people have been having more and more disagreements about the past. Well, you know, when a subject becomes controversial—especially when it becomes controversial and impossible to settle—”
“Of course!” I said, and now my head felt like it was in a vise. “Polite people start avoiding it. Nobody wants to be the rude person who brings it up. Ways are found to pussyfoot around it... sometime in the last few years, then, or maybe the last twenty or so at most, the worlds have started to drift together—”
She was sobbing again, and I rolled over and held her. This time I could guess. “Your mother?”
“Oh, yes, that.” She turned and hung on to me for dear life. “That, and if we’re right, then after all these years I just found out I’m not crazy.”
I suppose we could have talked more, but exhaustion swept over us, and though it seemed I just shut my eyes for a moment, when I looked up, it was already dawn. Helen was still in my arms, traces of tears all over her face, her lips wet and red, hanging slack. She looked impossibly young to me, and I lay there watching her till she began to move and her eyes opened.
At breakfast, we tried to have a normal, trivial conversation, but we discovered that we just weren’t going to be able to talk about much else. “There is a certain kind of sense to it,” Helen said. “Figure Iphwin owns all of ConTech, and ConTech might be as much as half of one percent of the global economy. He’s so big that he has to operate internal markets and figure out trade policies between his own holdings. There isn’t much way to take him down by a frontal assault—but if you can somehow make things less predictable, disrupt the causality inside the company, then that changes things. In some ways it’s not much different from doing random damage, like twentieth-century bombing raids, or getting the company directory and sending letter bombs at random. But in other ways it’s worse, because how can anyone plan that a certain number of time reversals will happen, or that some shipments that were never ordered will turn up from companies that don’t exist, or, like that case in Mexico, where ninety tons of specialty steel get shipped and forty thousand sets of pajamas get delivered? For most of the other possible kinds of attacks, you can control risk with insurance, because you know what the range is of what might happen, and what the likelihood is. Random bombings might be terrifying but they just add one more bad thing to the list of bad things that are likely to happen, and give it a high likelihood. But when the two things being messed with are the range of what might happen and how likely it is—then there’s no bet you can take out against it.”
“Suppose the enemy is Murphy,” I said, before I had time to analyze what I meant myself.
“Who’s Murphy?”
“Murphy’s Law?”
“Still never heard of it.”
“Oh. Well, it’s not really important. What I’m getting at is, how often do you discuss the past with your friends, in a way that matters to them? How many people have a long-running argument with their spouse about which of two perfectly plausible events happened to them a long time ago? There could be tremendous amounts of random noise in the past before anyone would notice there was any pattern of any such thing. And maybe small violations of causality account for Murphy’s Law, which is the law that ‘If anything can’t go wrong, it will.’ I mean, that’s a violation of causality right there.”