The Edge Page 4

  “No, I don’t think we’re really interested, Dad, but thanks.

  “We really need to be going, dear,” Aurora added, “Be sure to go out and see Annie, bye, dear, nice meeting you, Sally, we’ll talk again.”

  Donald whispered in William’s ear, “Nice catch, son, are you sure you don’t want to bring her?”

  “No dad, have a good time.”

  “Don’t be a stranger, son, bye.”

  After they left, Sally asked, “Who’s Annie, and what’s an orgy?”

  “I’ll explain orgy later, but first, about Annie, she’s my older sister, and she’s usually out here in the backyard.” She followed him through the kitchen and out a door, they stepped into a meadow filled with wildflowers, there were two cartoonish ponies prancing around. Then Sally saw a little girl of about four playing with some kittens, “Is that your sister’s daughter?”

  “No, that’s Annie, Annie!”

  Annie jumped up and ran toward them, “Billy! Billy! Piggyback please, please?”

  William picked her and ran around with her on his back, squealing with delight, then he swung her around by her arms several times before they fell to the ground laughing. He picked her up and carried her back to where Sally was standing, “Annie, I’d like you to meet someone, this is my friend, Sally.”

  “Sally!”

  “It's nice to meet you, Annie.”

  “Sally!”

  “William, you told me Annie was your older sister, exactly how much older is she?”

  “Well, I’m thirty, so she’d be forty-five.”

  “Forty-five and a half!” added Annie

  “Why does she choose to be a child here?”

  “It’s not her choice, it’s ours, my parents and mine, Annie was born with severe birth defects, it was very hard on my parents, and was why they waited so long to have me. Annie has no control over her body, and her mind will never develop past that of a four-year-old. While this is not a normal life, it’s more than she could ever have in the real world.”

  Sally was having a hard time holding back her tears, “I had a friend who had a baby that was born with no legs, they.. they...” She didn’t want to say it in front of Annie, “They did it like a food-beast, it was awful. This is a better world.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “William, did you ever wonder if there’s another world where Annie is…”

  “Is normal, yes, looking for her was one of the first things I did when I built the machine, She’s a wonderful woman, a psychologist, and a bestselling children’s author. This was her idea, and ‘Big Annie’ comes to visit ‘Little Annie’ regularly.”

  “Can't the Mecha-Med fix her, the way it fixed your foot?”

  “It can only fix what's broken, diseases or injuries. Annie's problems are genetic, there is no 'normal' pattern for the Mecha-Med to use as a template, even Big Annie's genes are too different to use.”

  “I don't understand; I think I need to study medicine.”

  Annie said, “Cookie!” and a plate of cookies floated over to them from nowhere, Annie enjoyed hers, to William and Sally, they had very little taste or texture, since the two of them had not been hardwired in.

  Then Annie got sleepy, and a bed appeared in the meadow, she crawled into it, said, “Night-night Billy, Night-Night Sally”, and fell asleep.

  William kissed her on the cheek, “We can go now.”

  “Will she be alright alone?”

  “Oh, she’s never alone, the ponies watch her.”

  “The ponies?”

  Annie woke up slightly, “Big Annie gave me a pony.” and fell back asleep.

  “The ponies are really people I hire to watch over her twenty-four hours a day, there are never fewer than two with her. Nothing can really happen to her that would hurt her, since her body’s not really here, but she can become frightened or lonely.” He waved at one and said, “Good night, Cindy.” She momentarily morphed into a middle-aged woman, and said, “Good night, William.” and then changed back into a pony.

  “That was strange,” said Sally, “She can do that because she's not real, right.”

  “Cindy's real, we're just not seeing the real her.”

  “My head hurts, can we go now?”

  12.

  William removed their virtual reality electrodes, they were both tired, Sally said she wanted to go to bed, but made William explain what an orgy was first. She said she didn’t think she would like it, with all those people, and she took a shower, and went to bed. About half an hour later, she knocked at his bedroom door, when he opened it, she was standing there in a bathrobe, her long straight black hair was still wet from the shower.

  “William, you love Annie, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do, very much, she’s very special.”

  “You’re very good with her.”

  “Thank you.” he wasn’t sure what to say, or where she was going with this.

  “You’re good with children.”

  “With Annie, anyway, I haven’t been around a lot of others.”

  “You would be good with them. Do you ever want any?”

  “Maybe, with the right woman.”

  “But not me.”

  “Why do you say that.”

  “You don’t love me, because I’m a cavewoman, do you?”

  “Who said I didn’t love you?”

  She swallowed hard, and began to tear up, she couldn’t look at him, “Every time things are going well between us, and I start thinking that maybe you love me, you try to hold my hand.”

  “That’s because sometimes I would like to hold your hand.”

  “Which means you just want to be my friend, and no more than that.”

  “What?”

  “Holding hands means you’re friends, parents do it with their kids, I used to do it with my brother, friends hold hands, if a man loves a woman, he asks her to his hut to try to make babies, if the woman loves him back, she says yes. If a man just holds your hand, it means he doesn’t want to try to make babies with you, he just wants to be your friend,” she was sobbing now, “and every time I think you are going to ask me to try to make a baby with you, you try to hold my hand!”

  “In my world, couples show they love each other by holding hands, I thought you weren’t interested in me, because you would pull your hand away.”

  She sniffled, “You mean, you wanted to hold my hand because you do love me?”

  “You are the most incredible, intelligent woman I have ever met, and I love you very much.”

  She reached her hand out to him, and he took it.

  “Then you do want to try to make babies with me?”

  “I do.”

  And they did, they tried three times that night and two more the next morning.

  13.

  Afterwards, as they laid in bed with their bodies entwined, William said, “I didn’t know you were a virgin.”

  “Virgin?”

  “Someone who’s never had sex, never tried to make babies before.”

  “No, this was my first time, it’s really fun, I didn’t know it was going to be so much fun.”

  “Is that unusual in your clan?”

  “Having fun?”

  “No, being a virgin at your age.”

  “Very unusual, most women my age already have had three or four babies, and sometimes, all of them lived… William, as fun as that is, how did your parents go so long without doing it? I don’t think I could go that long now that I know what it’s like.”

  What do you mean?”

  “You told me that after Annie was born, they waited fifteen years to have you. I know you don’t get a baby every time, though I don’t know why, but I know if you do it a lot, you’re going to have babies.”

  “It’s called ‘birth control’, there are lots of ways to do it, so you can choose when you want a baby.”

  “That’s good… Do you think we made a baby last night?”

  “I’m pretty certain we did not, I
had a, uh, procedure done when I was in school, so I wouldn’t be making any babies, I wasn’t ready.”

  “I don’t understand. How can that happen?” She seemed slightly disappointed.

  William explained the basics of reproduction and reversible vasectomies

  “So it can be reversed.” he said.

  She rolled over onto her stomach and smiled, “That’s really good, and we can keep practicing until it is.”

  Later, as they laid in bed, William found himself looking at her necklace, it had got in the way a few times, but she had refused to take it off. “Where did you get this? I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “My father gave it to me, just a few weeks before he disappeared, about the same time he brought home Fluffy.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “We didn’t keep track of time the same way you do, but it must have been about ten years ago. Why?

  “It’s metallic, and shows no sign of tarnish, or wear. I wonder if it’s meteoric.”

  “What’s meteoric, a metal?”

  “It’s something from a meteor, a rock that falls to earth from the sky, from space.”

  “Maybe somebody on the moon threw it at us.”

  Then they practiced making a baby for a while longer.

  14.

  They were just a few days away from the next jump, William felt almost the same way about this place as Sally had felt about that one clearing, and he wondered if they should stay here longer. That would mean missing critical time windows, and recalculating future jumps, which could mean a delay of years, and of course, there were the crabs.

  The crabs had rarely come out of the water when they had first arrived, now were coming further and further up the beach, maybe it was the season, or maybe it was the smell of the sirloins that William liked to grill outside. Either way, staying was not an option. Since they were preparing for a bigger jump, he thought he might try to better explain the structure of the universe, and the whole timeline thing and how they were doing it. He had the food synthesizer make four identical bananas, he sliced one across the middle, and showed her how the cross-section was a circle, and how it could also be sliced to create one long oval, two smaller short ovals, or a long crescent shape. He explained how each universe was just a small slice of the whole macroverse, how a universe looked depended on how it was sliced from the whole.

  She stared at him and said, “William, I love you, but your analogies are really stupid. Bob says that humans can’t understand it, you don’t understand it, so you can’t explain it to me. I can accept that I can’t understand it. It works, that’s all I need to know.” From then on, “That depends on how you slice it.” became synonymous with “You can’t understand it, just accept that.”

  After one practice session on the beach, as they were lying on a blanket, holding hands, she asked him, “How did you become interested in other timelines?”

  “When I was in high school, I had already read the theories, but everybody believed they were just theories, that if other timelines did exist, travel between them was impossible no matter what the theories said. Then my parents moved.”

  “And?”

  “We were packing up the kitchen, we had a set of eighteen drinking glasses, there were six small, six medium and six large. We packed them up in a box, but when we unpacked them in our new house, there were six small, five medium and seven large.”

  “Can glasses grow?”

  “No, what happened was impossible, my parents just decided they had been mistaken about what they’d had before, but I knew that this was due to a merger of almost, but not quite identical universes. Another time, I wanted to re-read one of my favorite books, a collection of short stories. But it was gone from my shelf, I thought I’d lost it. I had a friend who had a copy of the same book, so I went to his house to borrow it. Not only was his copy gone, he didn’t remember ever having or reading the book. A few months later, I noticed the book back on my shelf, the next time I went to my friend’s house, not only was his copy back, but he had no recollection of it being missing or of us talking about it. I began to watch for anomalies like that. Have you ever looked all over for something, and then found it right there in a place where you had already looked several times, and could not possibly have overlooked it? Or have you found something that you have no memory of having?”

  She nodded. He continued, “Things like this are happening all the time, but people just blame forgetfulness or ineptitude, sometimes they just blame someone else, and may accuse them of lying about it. I realized that what’s really happening is universes are merging even though they’re not quite identical. If they merged by themselves, how difficult could it be to make them merge when you wanted them to? I figured, not very.”

  That night, one of the giant crabs came within fifty feet of the Winnie. Sally wanted to try to kill it with a rock, but William thought that might be too dangerous. He showed her how to use a sub-sonic pressure-wave gun he’d picked up in the twenty-third century, it was very effective, and not messy. They cut off one of the legs, and roasted it, it was delicious, and more than enough for both of them.

  William also scanned it with the food synthesizer, both cooked, and uncooked so they could duplicate it if they ever wanted it again. The rest, they pushed back down to the surf, and it kept the other crabs busy for a while, devouring it.

  Some crabs were approaching the Winnebago as they prepared for the jump. William explained that they were slow moving, compared to normal crabs because while they weighed about a thousand times as much as a normal crab, they were only about a hundred times as strong. She asked, “What’s a normal crab?” He’d forgotten that she’d never seen an ocean before this one, and these were the only crabs she’d ever seen.

  One crab was almost at the Winnie when they made the jump, if crabs were intelligent enough to be surprised, this one might have been when the Winnebago was suddenly replaced by a Winnebago shaped chunk of snow, which almost immediately collapsed, burying the crab.

  15.

  Alexander Fergus surveyed the ocean from just outside the door of the igloo, it was bloody cold outside, but not that much colder than winter in Braemar, back in Scotland, where he had spent his youth, but this was all year long, at least Braemar was above freezing a good part of the year.

  Fergus didn’t mind the lonely wait, he was a loner by nature, his ex-wife even complained that he seemed alone even when they were together. He was a large, burly man, a true Scot, six foot two, over 18 stone, with a full, unruly red beard and red hair, though now slightly balding. He had wild eyes and a loud booming voice, which he rarely censored when he had an opinion, and he had a lot of opinions. He’d only ever had one good friend, a student from the university who he had mentored and with whom he had maintained a close friendship. The only person he’d never been able to offend. Now he had one chance to save his friend from ‘the dew’. He’d been here two years, keeping the light going, in hopes his old friend would head this way and see the light.

  16.

  Had William been in the cab of the Winnie, rather than in his basement lab when they made the jump, he would have noticed that there was zero visibility outside. When he tried the door, it would not budge.

  “Bob, why can’t I open the door?”

  “I believe we are buried in snow.”

  “Snow?”

  “Yes, William, snow, it’s a crystalline state of water with a low packing density, commonly white, but occasionally yellow, which is not advised for human consumption.”

  “I know what snow is, my question is, why are we buried in it, and how deeply are we buried?”

  “I’m estimating our depth at ten point two-one meters.”

  “Any suggestions?”

  “About what?”

  “About getting unburied, Bob, what do you think.”

  “I wasn’t sure you would want to be unburied.”

  “Why wouldn’t we be.”

  “Well, I’ve
noticed that the two of you have been able to occupy yourselves quite effectively lately, we’re only here for nine days, is there any reason you really need to go out?”

  “We might want to have a look around.”

  “You would enjoy that more than copulating?”

  William was getting annoyed, “No, but we can’t do that all the time.”

  “I’m not sure that’s true, from what I’ve seen.”

  “If you don’t like it, you don’t have to watch, I’d rather prefer that you didn’t. Now what’s our best option for getting out of the snow?”

  “A six-second upward blast from our retro-thrusters will vaporize all the snow above us, then we can lift off, and explore to your little heart’s content.”

  William had never actually used the flight capabilities of the Winnie, he’d paid a fortune for the setup, but, even though it was his idea, he found the concept of a flying Winnebago a little disconcerting, no matter how cool it had seemed at the time. He told Bob to go ahead with melting the snow.

  Hovering at two thousand meters above the snow. William suddenly realized that this was a place he knew, yet radically changed. To the north, the Columbia was no longer a river, but a mighty glacier, Portland was in ruins, buildings that had not been in the path of the glacier had collapsed under the weight of the snow, there was not a sign of remaining human habitation.

  “Bob, I know where we are, what’s the date here?’

  “It’s the Thirtieth of October, 2118. This timeline is exactly parallel to the timeline of your origin.

  “Can you tell when it diverged.”

  “I have an eighty-eight percent probability that it diverged on or about April 13, 2036.”

  “Wasn’t there an asteroid that people worried about striking the Earth? Maybe it hit in this world.”

  “That was Apophis, which made a close approach, it wasn’t large enough to cause a permanent winter, it must be some other factor.”

  William considered teaching Sally to ski, but it was really cold out there, and he had never skied himself. They could travel south to where it should be warmer. Bob calculated a high probability of a moderately pleasant region in Brazil. The Winnie could only fly at about 200 knots, if they went there, the trip would take twenty-seven hours, and they would have to fly another twenty-seven hours to get back to where they needed to be for the next jump. With the risk of hitting bad weather, and the time it would make unavailable for coupling, William decided they should just explore locally.