The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Antti handed the bottle through the firelight. Paavo poured, and the two men drank in silence, one too proud to admit his hurt, the other to apologize. When you were Yuri’s age, on such a night as this we went out through those French windows into the gardens and named the winter constellations together, Antti thought. I saw you look up. I saw their light in your eyes. I have always respected your work, even if I haven’t always comprehended it, and if I am scornful, if I am critical and bitter, it is because, like my ATOM project, there, too, a great promise has been betrayed. Buy things. Look at things. The constellations in this cyberspace have no shine, no wonder. They are shaped like Coke logos and Nike swooshes. There is no sparkle in them to catch in your eye. They don’t call you outward from home.

Now Paavo was taking a flat case from his bag beside his chair. He set it on his lap, unfolded it. Blue screen light illuminated his face.

“This is the thing you wanted to show me?” Antti asked. “Another laptop.”

“No,” Paavo said carefully. “Not another laptop. You were saying about the universe being too big for us? No, it’s not. I’ve got it right in here.” He tapped the translucent blue polycarbonate casing. “I’ve got them all in here. Infinite universes, in one small box.”

“You got it to work, then.”

The son nodded.

“If Einstein couldn’t get his head around quantum theory, I don’t imagine that I ever will,” Antti said, realizing as the words left him how mealy they sounded. “This quantum computing: calculations being made simultaneously in thousands of parallel universes, each as real as this room, as us, that dog…”

Other rooms, like reflections of reflections. Mirror in mirror. Other worlds. One where the crew of Novy Mir were not pulled from the capsule at T-minus-seven because the booster, the ATOM mission, the entire Mars project had been so rotten with corruption and creaming-off that safety standards had been squandered.

The moment you went for throttle-up, the fuel lines would have ruptured, Launch Controller Barsamian had said as the army transporter sped away from the launch site, the summer dust pluming up behind it. The call came through from Kirilenko. The whole thing is rotten. Rotten to the heart. It always was. A quick, cheap fix.

He had glanced back through the window at the great white tower on the scorched steppe and thought, Was there a chance it could have flown, or had it been quick and cheap and botched from the start? All a feint in the game with the Americans?

In another world, the word did not come from Kirilenko in time. They went for throttle-up. It blew.

In another universe, they went for throttle-up. It flew. It flew right off this world, on to another. They came burning down in an arc of fire clear across Amazonis Planitia and the calderas of Elysium. Ten kilometers above Isidia Planifia the descent stage fired. They came down in fire and steam in the crater shadow of Nili Patera. The hammer and sickle of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was stabbed into the regolith and unfurled in the winds of Syrtis Major.

Somewhere in that thin plastic case, that possibility existed.

“Can I see it?”

Paavo gave a shrug of assent. Antti lifted the plastic shell as if what it held were terribly terribly fragile. It was lighter than he had imagined.

“All these…”

Paavo smiled. Antti turned the screen toward him, angled it to make sense and shape out of the plasma film screen. A brief frown of disappointment: the display was a standard operating system interface. But its pristine touch pads, white as milk teeth, called his fingers to type. Test us if we speak the truth.

“I feel I should ask it something.”

“It’s not an oracle. It’s just a computer.”

“All the same…”

“It’s still garbage in, garbage out in every universe.” The coals collapsed, sending up a spear of flame, and the dog started, and they were two men together with the mad cold outside the window. “If it were an oracle, if it could send one question out into all universes and all times, what would you ask?”

Paavo saw his father smile, then think, then the light from the surge of fire fade from his face. Slowly, deliberately, with winter-stiff fingers, not wanting to get one holy word wrong, Antti began to type.

The locker rooms are all numbered and work in strict rotation. Fifteen hundred workers off-shifting as the next battalion shift on would clash like Vedic armies in the corridors and changing rooms, so they are channeled into separate sectors. Ashwin always imagines he can feel the drub of feet through the carbon steel skeleton of the tower. Likewise, though he never met his shift predecessor, Ashwin knows the heat and particular perfume of his body (irrefutably a his) from the imprint on the live-leather transfer seat.