Truth is colder than the February pavement. Three layers of cardboard cannot protect you from truth.
This quantum universe. People did not understand. McNavel thought he understood. Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make very clever indeed.
Understanding had brought him to this bleak railway arch in winter. The lecture rooms and panelled halls of his college, filled now as then with undergraduates and their second-year theories of why Einstein might have been wrong, were far away and long ago. McNavel hadn’t been interested in standard models, he’d wanted to see the whole cloth.
“Do you indeed?” The dragon of creation let him glimpse her coils and shimmering scales. The vision burned McNavel’s brain. Words clamoured inside.
There had been a girl at one of those colleges, so much promise … They still hadn’t caught the killer.
He tried to explain it to Clive Mitchell in the canteen. “This coffee cup, every atom of liquid, each baryon and meson, the quarks inside —”
Mitchell patiently stirred his tea, used to the way McNavel’s insights drew into focus.
“There’s another universe where the only thing that’s different is that two electrons are in each other’s orbits. That’s just one atom inside this coffee cup. All the same, all different.”
That girl. Murdered and not murdered, a billion lives, a billion corpses … trillions, boiling like smoke.
Mitchell touched his hand, puzzled, worried. “Everything OK?”
Everything? He wanted to laugh.
“Peter?” Mitchell called as McNavel hurried away.
*****
At first he was brilliantly, overwhelmingly on fire. He wrote a frantic scribble. “This isn’t science, it’s art, philosophy — poetry!”
“Good, good,” Helen laughed, happy to see him happy. “Come and eat.”
He danced her around the room. “No time, no time!”
Read more science fiction from Nature Futures
She brought him a sandwich. He was still there in the morning. So was the sandwich, less one bite.
He had never paid attention to their mortgage or utility bills. Dear Helen, what a patient marvel. Now he dismissed hygiene, the need to give lectures, to turn up at all. On a googolplexian other worlds he was doing these things but here he must work, day and night.
Not so slowly, he began his descent.
Helen, the Dean, Clive Mitchell, a handful of postgraduates, all leaned over the edge and held out their hands. They lowered ladders, emotional and metaphysical, and ever-longer ropes. He ignored them and kept on writing, kept on digging.
*****
“I’m not special, nothing is special — Well, ‘Nothing’ actually is quite special, but what I mean is I, me, this precious one-and-only. I’m just one side of a decision, a locus in the infinite cascade, a twig on the tree, a branch in the delta, the result of a quark in some hadron in a galaxy 12 trillion light years away emitting a gluon. I’m not a point of origin, not even of myself. And neither are you.”
*****
He just walked away. All needs were satisfied so many trillions of times elsewhere that even Graham’s number was inadequate. He stood on the doorstep and glimpsed new beauty. Every journey starts with a single step. His choice was one of two: left foot or right. Infinity collapsed to duality.
Left foot. It felt like the most important decision he had ever made.
*****
Kind strangers gave him food. Having once not eaten a sandwich, sandwiches saved him.
Tweed and corduroy proved remarkably durable, shabby sans chic. Grey-haired and white-bearded, he came to appreciate the true value of good shoes.
“Statistically speaking this isn’t happening,” he told the spiky-haired young man with fish tattoos at the night kitchen.
“It’s happening to you, though, innit?”
“Well, there is that.”
*****
He became the washed-up jetsam of his own life. Shop doorways, tunnels and archways. Fires burned on the wasteland. The damp cold of rain-soaked concrete rinsed years from his life.
Smoke of infinity blew harder than hurricanes.
Then he was last in the queue, running on empty. A girl with fingerless gloves handed him soup and bread. “All right?”
“I think, therefore I am, but when I sleep I don’t think.”
“Sounds deep. Philosophy?”
“No. I used to …” What was it exactly? “I tried … to understand what was really happening.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.” Those inward-looking eyes. “Unfortunately.”
“Liam said you mentioned statistics.”
“No.” He stood there, soup in hand. “Who’s Liam?”
“Spiky hair, fish tattoos.”
“Ah, cheese sandwich and coffee. Physics, that’s what we called it.”
“Do you miss it?”
“I don’t think it misses me.”
She brought him magazines, then took him to the library and sat with him. He found a book and read a chapter. In another world he had lectured the author.
He found references to his own work.
*****
One evening he blinked and the world flooded in. The sunset street, the cloud-torn sky, the wrinkled skin on the back of his hand.
Liam wasn’t there, just the girl. “Hey, how’s it going?”
It was going well. Infuriatingly, his tongue was tied.
“It’s OK. I was just asking.”
He blinked again and his dragon-locked tongue broke free. “I am very well, thank you.”
And now it was she who could not speak as he changed into a different version of himself.
“What’s your name?”
“Jes.”
“Thank you, Jes. Thank you for everything.”
*****
McNavel watched the river flow. Across the multiverse all possibilities were made real, all questions answered, and everything is known.
It was quite simple really. He was surprised he hadn’t thought of that before.
He contemplated the sloughing smoke of his infinite selves and realized he could no longer see it blow.
Forty years in this strange land. He had never left, and at the same time, he was coming home.
