everyone I knew left a long time ago.” He was sad, but he was tranquil in his sadness.
“It ain’t right,” Horner said.
“When was it?” asked Joe. Horner didn't have an answer for him.
Joe asked for one thing, that Horner stall the oil men a few days, long enough to remove his personal belongings, and to drive as much of his herd would go, and he obliged him gladly.
Six days after he sent a telegram east, Horner received a return visit. He recognized the knock at the door, and like last time shooed his family into the back room; he wondered if they were reneging on the deal. Horner saw Gene, the older man, first. “We come in?” He stepped out of the way to let them through.
A long, tense moment passed; Horner couldn’t get a read on Pete, and the older man was stifling something. “Seems they didn’t trust Joe, so even with your assurances, they brought some hired guns to his place.” Then Gene almost smiled. “Apparently, the old Indian dynamited his place before he left, so that when they arrived to force him away, the whole place went kablooie. It was big enough the oil well caught fire, and the oil company’s still trying to get it put out.”
“Best of all possible outcomes- not for my employer, mind you- but for the general state of justice in the world. Now, for your troubles, I wish I could give you a pardon, but the governor’s a hard man to bribe, besides which it’s not clear that crimes committed in the territory would have been covered, anyway. But we got you the next best thing.” The older agent handed Horner a newspaper from the day before, and at the bottom of the front page was a story titled, “Notorious Outlaw Matt Horner Dead.”
Horner’s eyes flicked to the kid, assuming that was the moment he’d feel a bullet in his chest, but Pete was standing with his shoulders low, shaking his head. “You’re dead,” Gene beamed. “Me and the boy claimed the bounty off some drifter couldn’t take ‘No’ for an answer, roughly fitting the description. And Marshals don’t hunt dead men.” Gene turned on his heel, and tipped his hat. “Do enjoy your little slice of heaven, son, I do believe you earned it.” Pete slunk out behind him.
Table of Contents
Parallel
The secret of the multiverse is the kind of thing you’d expect to be held by a sect of mysterious Buddhist monks, or at least a deep-thinking philosopher, but I learned it in school- at the satellite university. And it wasn’t in my physics class- but in web design.
One day the instructor held me after. He said he had something to show me. He waited until the silence was thick, and I was about to ask what he needed when he started to speak. “Reality isn’t the things we see, or hear, or feel- there’s a lot going on there, under the surface. There isn’t just this world, but countless ones. But they exist on top of one another, like plates in an anatomy textbook. What we see, then, is the average of all existing universes- in the same way that the two different pictures from your eyes are synthesized into one.”
“I figured out how to look at these other worlds. Walk in them. Touch them.” Mostly bemused, I asked how. “How about a programming example. Let’s say you want to open up FireFox- you don’t start programming from scratch all the commands that go into starting FireFox- you just run the program. It’s something your brain already does. It knows how to synthesize all of that input- all you’re doing is convincing it not to- but instead to focus on just one input.”
He described it as “reprogramming the sensory parts of your mind,” but in practice it was as much about meditation as it was about any kind of complex logic problem solving. I played with his techniques for a week, usually barely able to do more than catch glimpses of things that shouldn’t be there- like a horse galloping towards me in the middle of the campus commons; then again, when I was younger I’d believed I could talk in tongues. But the things I thought I saw, I couldn’t talk to, and it didn’t seem like they saw me, let alone felt inclined to talk.
Then one night I woke to the sound of heavy breathing. I realized I had been asleep, that the breathing had been layered into a dream- a dream about my father. My father killed himself when I was thirteen; he’d been having an affair with a woman at work, and she ended it- and while I never blamed her, because there were obviously other things at play, it factored heavily in my dreams about him.
But the breathing was loud, real, and certainly not mine. “You shouldn’t have come here.” I knew the voice immediately, and my eyes broke open. “This was my house- mine and your mother's. Only she took it from me in the divorce.” I knew that wasn’t right- dad hadn’t lived that long- mom only found out about the affair because he swallowed a shotgun.
He put his hands around my throat. I don’t remember much of what he said, then, but he blamed me, for siding with her, for living with her after she took his house, for living with her and her new husband while they rented his house out. But I knew he wasn’t a ghost- just someone from a place different from this one. I closed my eyes, told my mind to filter things again, and his fingers slid through my neck as he dissipated like vapor.
The next day I talked with my web design teacher. “Why did you show me this? It’s not just because you think I’m bright enough to do it, or even understand it. So why?”
He stroked his beard, suddenly very professorial, preparing his sophistry to answer a student’s question. “Hmm. Okay, how about this: think of the multiverse as an organism. As decisions, and I mean important ones, not should I put butter or jam on my toast ones, but as their consequences manifest, universes split, like cells dividing. Normally, that’s fine- after all, we exist in an at least theoretically infinite space. But sometimes, something happens that shouldn’t. A universe becomes warped, tainted, and its histories, maybe even its physics, are no longer descended from its parent universe- you can think of it as a kind of multiversal cancer.”
“Now in an organism, there’s a defense system that cleans out cancer cells- but in the multiverse- well, there’s none that we know of. But I discovered a universe just like that. Right now it’s just a small deviation- a girl who doesn’t seem to exist anywhere else but this one world, and not as part of the mean, like a cell with damage on a single chromosome. But if we let it continue, the damage will multiply over time- eventually, it could kill entire universes, squeezing them out. So we have to burn the cancer out. And that, in a nutshell, is why I need you. You see, I met this girl while teaching a class in one of these other worlds- so she has some connection to me, and that connection could allow her taint to travel over into our world, or, more worrisome, into the collective reality, in effect infecting all universes at once.”
“This is a bit much to take in.” I hesitated. “But you want me to kill this girl.” I’d started it as a question, but it ended a statement.
“There was a world, far removed from the consensus, where my mother didn’t die from cervical cancer. I was, of course, happy, because I had her back- though only kind of. But one day she told me she’d started dating a man- and naturally, I felt protective, and tried to look into him. And he didn’t exist here; I couldn’t find evidence of him existing anywhere. And details kept changing, and I was convinced he had to be a con artist, and planned to tell my mother so, only to find the two of them having lunch- and he was now a woman. The inconsistencies increased, metastasized, until there was no longer any denying that there was something wrong. So one day I walked with my mother’s lover to the grocery store, and when a large truck passed by, I shoved her into its path.”
“But already the damage had spread. I recognized it in my mother at the funeral. I visited another couple of times before I realized what was going to happen, and stopped; I’d buried my mother once before, and couldn’t stand to do it again. Eventually I overcame my cowardice, and tried to return, but she was gone. In fact, that entire world was gone, replaced by something barely even recognizable as the Earth.”
“It’s no small burden, I know- but our time is short, and you’ll need to decide soon, or your decision will be made without you.?
?? I pondered for the next thirty hours, unable to sleep, unable to force myself to read my schoolbooks. So I “glanced sideways,” which was how I’d started referring to it, and attended the class where he’d met her.
It wasn’t difficult finding her- she sat up front in the class, and stared up at him with raw admiration, dutifully scribbling in a little notebook. Of course, he hadn’t mentioned that she was beautiful, with long, curly blond hair and a round but pleasant face.
I’m not entirely sure why, but I decided to talk to her. Perhaps it was simply that she was beautiful, and I was still young enough that that was a controlling factor. But as class ended, I made sure I bumped into her rather hard on my way past her seat, knocking her bottled water out of her hand and emptying its contents on the carpet. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said. “Please, let me buy you a cup of coffee, as a peace offering.”
She smiled, a little dubious, and said, “That’s got to be the clumsiest come-on I’ve ever seen.”
“No, it’s- really, it’s not. I just, I feel awful. Just let me buy you a cup of coffee, to ease my conscience. You don’t even have to drink it, if you don’t want to. It’s just my penance.”
She smiled, and