“Anybody ever have a class in economics, where they talk about transitivity? Like if you like apples better than bananas, and bananas better than oranges, you’re supposed to like apples better than oranges? And you know how it makes a total mess of things if people then like oranges better than apples anyway, because then you could get someone to never eat the fruit, but just keep trading and trading and trading—”
“Oh, dear, again,” Iphwin said. “You’re right.”
Terri and I looked at each other, then at Jesús, and finally, speaking for all of us, Terri said, “Why did it just get incomprehensible in here?”
“Well,” Iphwin said, “which do you like better, apples, bananas, or oranges?”
“Apples, I guess,” I said, “and then bananas, kind of in that order.”
“Now, I give you the choice, and you take the apple and eat it. I give you the choice over and over, and you keep eating apples. So you settle down, once and for all, on just eating apples.”
“Of course not,” I said. “Iphwin, you’re thinking like a machine again. Pretty soon I’d stop liking apples so much, and want some variety. And then ... oh, god, I see it now. Ever hear about the grass always being greener on the other side of the fence?” I said to Terri.
“Yeah.”
“Well, if you were a sheep, and the whole round world were made up of fences and pastures, and your priority were always trying to get somewhere greener—you’d never eat any grass. You’d spend all your time jumping fences, because every time you jumped one, you’d see another, greener pasture, just beyond the next fence. You might get very far away, but you’d just jump and jump and jump, always improving but never finding a pasture where you could stop—even if you ended up back home, because maybe the desire to jump is just the desire for yet another change. Now, changing your mind and reshuffling into another world millions of times per second, for minute after minute, day after day, decade after decade, is not something a person would do—”
“But it’s something a machine would do. And it’s what the artificial intelligences did,” Iphwin finished. “The Americans are not all in heaven, as I’d thought. Paula’s right. The Americans are all still out there—way, way, way out there—as far as you can go in five dimensions of possibility, changing between awesome numbers of event sequences—and always having one more change to do. Chasing through time, forever. Space, time, and possibility are big enough so that they’re never coming back, but it’s finite—so they’re going to curve on and on, never coming back and never getting any further away. The only Americans who escaped that fate—”
“Were the ones outside the country,” I said. “And the only people who were going to come looking for America would be expat Americans, which is how all the worlds in which America had a lot of expatriates—the ones where it was conquered and the ones where repressive regimes came to power—all became so closely linked. And—Iphwin, it’s horrible, they’re only in each world for a microsecond or so, so they aren’t experiencing anything—”
“They’re experiencing whatever you experience when you are nanoseconds away from being perfectly happy—though not quite so perfectly as they will be about to be a few hundred nanoseconds after that,” Iphwin said, sadly. “Well, now I have a common interest with Billie Beard, at last. We need to suppress that algorithm, or there will be no more people, and hence no one for us to do things for. I will need to talk to her.
“However, when she’s trying to break down the door with a bunch of her well-armed avatars, it is really not the time for a reasonable conversation. Which reminds me, detection instruments I’ve found and activated within the building tell me that she’s now walking up the corridor to the office where your physical selves are, which means the next question is how best to get you out of there. If everyone is done with breakfast, let’s go for a walk on the beach.”
Did you ever start out to learn a game that made no sense, until one moment you suddenly found that you were just playing it, and it all worked? That was my experience of learning to cross event sequences and to move physically without needing transportation. It’s more a way of looking at the world, and just relaxing and falling through to another world, than anything else. Iphwin had a lengthy explanation about quantum processes inside the cells of the brain, and about how this might account for some mysterious disappearances throughout history, but this had no more to do with learning the trick than studying the physics of wheels or the history of paving does with learning to ride a bicycle. We got so we could do it, and then we got good at it. We all played with it for several days there in the beach cottage and on the land around it, retiring every evening to the cottage on the beach, until one day the sun came out, and we all shook hands, and were back in the office, standing around the secretary’s desk.
We heard the clatter of a dozen pairs of high heels in the hallway; the Billies were on the floor and looking for us. “My office, north of Surabaya, a week from now,” Iphwin said.
There was a thunder of feet outside, and all five of us just went, moving through all of the myriad worldlines until we found something where Beard wasn’t coming, then walking out the door, taking the Jeep—each of us individually, since the Jeep was there in so many worlds—and driving back down to Mexico. I had a couple of interesting conversations at the frontier, but there was no rule against driving in from that side, and my passport, of course, didn’t show that I had been anywhere since Torreón. Once I was far enough south, I got a decent hotel room, a long night’s sleep, and a ticket for Surabaya, which in this timeline was inexplicably called by some long Russian name.
A week later, I caught Mac the limo back to the Big Sapphire, collected Fluffy the cat and a few possessions, and went in for our meeting with Iphwin.
“Really,” he said, “since you’re always leaving selves behind as you do this—it’s an unpleasant thought but undoubtedly all of us got some self or other killed back in Santa Fe—from here on out you can live by moving into worlds where you’re rich, as needed, and you can more or less pursue any happiness you care to. I just thought we might all want to agree as to how to meet up at the virtual reality cottage; I had a feeling we might want to see each other.”
Terri wasn’t planning on returning to her parents; what teenager, given infinite money and choice, would? “It’s a big lots of worlds out there,” she said, “and I’m going to see plenty of it. Just now I’m a little depressed, but I figure there’s infinite adventure out there, or at least finite adventure so big I’ll never get done.”
Jesús nodded. “I understand the urge. I think I will take a little walk through a few million worlds, and see if there are places where I can do some good.”
Paula and I decided to make a vacation of it, down in Oz, since we had found out we were so compatible in the cottage. But after a couple of weeks of her perpetually wanting to go out and surf, or to the pistol range, or that sort of thing—and my wanting to sit on the beach and read—we understood it wasn’t going to work out. She left a very nice note saying she was off to stir up trouble in a few billion worlds, and not to leave the light on for her.
Me, I zipped through a billion worlds or so, taking about a year, till I found an event sequence where Helen had broken her arm the day before my leaving for the job interview, turned up in her hospital room with some ridiculous excuse, multiple armloads of roses, and the much-harder-to-explain Fluffy. It took a lot of explaining and some outright tale-telling, but Helen seems to be no longer suspicious, not even about my hypothetical rich uncle who left us the large fortune with which we were to raise kids in a big house in Auckland. We’ve got a Paula and a Terri, but an American girl wasn’t about to have a son named Jesús, so…