“So?”
“Well, think about it. You’re trying to prevent an act of conception by killing this”—Jesse recalled the name from his briefing—“Alois Hitler. But the conception can’t happen if Alois never marries Klara. And even if he does marry her, the circumstances of their marriage will be altered. Bluntly speaking, the fucking will happen differently, producing a different result.”
“It’s possible,” Weismann admitted. “I’ve thought of that myself. And maybe Kemp’s right. But he could be wrong. Alois Hitler is a genetic gun, cocked and loaded and aimed at six million human beings. It’s not enough to just hope the gun misfires.”
It was becoming clear to Jesse that Weismann wouldn’t be talked out of his project, perhaps for good reasons. Many millions dead, up there in the unimaginable future. Something the educational dioramas at the City neglected to mention. “All right,” Jesse said.
“What?”
“All right. I’m not going to pull a pistol on you and drag you back to Illinois by main force. Do what you think is best. Will you answer a question, though, before I leave you to it?”
Weismann shrugged suspiciously.
“According to the City, there are more worlds and histories than can ever be counted. A world next door to this one and a world next door to that, and so on, like grains of sand on a beach. And there’s an Alois Hitler in each of them. At best, you can only kill one. What’s the point?”
“That sounds like something August Kemp would say. But it’s a bullshit argument. This world has a twin, one Planck second away in Hilbert space. And that world has a twin. And so on. Hall of mirrors. But each one is as real as any other, and they’re interconnected. If I stick a pistol in your mouth and blow your brains out, that act is reflected in every domain of Hilbert space that follows from it.”
“But there’s the 1877 in your history books, where you didn’t blow my brains out.”
“And that’s also real and unchangeable. So there are Hilbert vectors where you live, Hilbert vectors where you die. Does that make it okay if I kill you now?”
“No. That does not make it okay.”
“Because right now, right here, for moral and ethical purposes, there’s only one of you. You’re not a shadow or a reflection or a possibility. You’re as real as I am. And this world is real. Back home, back in what you call the future, some of us understand that. We think Kemp is doing something immoral by turning this version of 1877 into a tourist attraction, as if it were some colonial backwater where you can lie in the sun and drink mai tais while the natives die of cholera. Some of us refuse to look the other way while Kemp monetizes an entire fucking universe.” Weismann drained the stein that had been sitting in front of him. “Maybe I’m more radical than some, but I’m not the only one. I’m just willing to make a bigger sacrifice.”
“Shall I say that to Kemp?”
Weismann stood up, his chair teetering behind him. “Tell August Kemp to bend over and fuck himself,” he said. “Or, better yet, ask him who invented the Mirror.”
A week later, the City’s Pinkerton men reported that Weismann had bought passage to Hamburg on the steamship Frisia. If you want a thing done right, Jesse supposed, better to do it yourself. He wasn’t sure whether he should hope for the success of Weismann’s project. One relatively innocent life in exchange for millions sounded reasonable, but it was a hard bargain for poor old Alois. Maybe, if Weismann got close enough, he could effect a compromise by shooting off the man’s balls instead of killing him.
Mrs. Standridge was quiet, almost melancholic, on the train back to New York, which gave Jesse ample time to contemplate the unanswered questions her story had raised. “You said you left New York with enough cash to buy clothes and transportation and to rent a room for a year?”
She nodded abstractedly. The Hudson River valley rolled past the window, dimming into sunset. The passenger car was foggy with cigar smoke. “It seemed like enough, at any rate.”
“Banknotes or specie?”
“Banknotes.”
“May I ask where you got them?”
“I told you, my family back home is more or less wealthy.”
“Yes, ma’am, I understand that. And I figured the money must be paper, because your husband would have noticed if you were carrying bags of coins through the Mirror.”
“Not just my husband. Going through the Mirror is like getting on a plane: You have to pass through security screening, including metal detectors. A bag of gold would have set off all the alarms, literally and figuratively.”
“Paper is more portable.”
“It would have been. But I didn’t carry paper, either.”
“Then where did your money come from?”
She hesitated. “I’d rather not say.”
“Then I apologize for asking. It’s just that I’m curious.”
“If it were up to me I’d tell you all about it. But I don’t want to get anyone else in trouble.” She hesitated. “I will say that a greenback isn’t hard to duplicate with twenty-first-century technology.”
“Your money was counterfeit?”
“My money was in every practical way indistinguishable from money issued by your banks, let’s put it that way.”
“You’re inflating the national currency.”
“The country’s in a recession, if you haven’t noticed. The goldbugs might disagree, but a little inflation isn’t a bad thing under the circumstances.”
Which left the question of who had slipped her the fake paper. But she refused to talk about that.
He watched from the window as the river came into sight: the Hudson, grown dark and turbulent as daylight drained from the sky. Not far to go now. “One other thing if you don’t mind. From when you first heard about August Kemp’s resort to when you crossed the Mirror, how much time passed?”
“Terrence barely paid attention when Kemp’s first resort opened. It took years for him to come around.”
“You said, Kemp’s first resort.”
“Ah.” She nodded. “They warned us not to talk about that with locals. But the rules are different between us, aren’t they?”
“I expect so,” Jesse said. “Really, it’s an open secret. Rumors get around.” Which was almost true. Back at the City, some claimed Kemp had opened other Mirrors into other times, other places. Those who knew the truth of the matter would neither confirm nor deny it.
“The problem is historical drift,” Mrs. Standridge said. “Kemp is selling tickets to history as we know it, but as soon as the City is constructed, that history begins to mutate. So he closes after five years, before the drift becomes too obvious. Then he opens the Mirror on a new 1872—or 1873, or 1874—all fresh and unsuspecting and completely virginal. The City in Illinois is the second one he’s built. Next year he’ll open a third.”
So—if this was true—there had already been another City, in one of those next-door worlds Kemp talked about … and had some other version of Jesse been hired to work at it? He guessed not; the Mirror was said to be imprecise; that other City might have arrived months after Jesse passed the spot, or might have been fully staffed months before he reached it. Still, it was an eerie thought. “I suppose he learns from experience.”
“I’m sure he does. And so do his enemies.”
“And who might they be?”
“I don’t really know a lot about it.” Ms. Standridge turned her head and closed her eyes as if she wanted to sleep, or wanted Jesse to think she wanted to sleep. “Will you be traveling with me all the way to the City?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Jesse said. “I go where they send me.”