Bad Grrlz' Guide to Reality: The Complete Novels Wild Angel and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell (72 page)

Susan frowned and glanced at Tom, thinking he might suggest that they break off from the group and have lunch alone, but he just nodded, going along with Ian’s suggestion.

Susan sat between Tom and Pat, with Max and Ian on the other side of the table. Tom took Susan’s hand, smiling at her.

She should be upset, she thought. It was the last day of the cruise. She had spent two nights with Tom, and soon they would be saying good-bye. They hadn’t talked about what was going on between them. There hadn’t been time for that.

But she was surprisingly relaxed. Something would work out, though she had no idea what.

“How are you feeling this morning?” Tom asked Pat.

The skin surrounding Pat’s eye had darkened to shades of deep purple and blue, forming a spectacular shiner. But she was smiling.

“Just fine,” she said.

“How about you, Max?” Tom asked.

Max smiled. “Quite well,” he said. “I think I’ve finally got a handle on the book I need to write.”

“Can you tell us about it?” Ian asked.

Max nodded. “It’s obvious, really. A serial killer on a cruise ship.” Susan stared at him. “An imaginary character who is a serial killer?”

Max shook his head. “Oh, no—an actual killer. Seems to me a cruise ship is the perfect environment for a killer. It’s so easy to dispose of the evidence. In the end, the killer turns out to be the ship’s chief security officer.” He smiled at Tom. “Sorry, Tom. It’s just that you’re the least likely candidate. I think it will be one of Weldon’s best.”

Tom nodded. “Speaking of unlikely,” he said slowly, “I was hoping that the two of you might be able to explain what happened last night.” He was looking at Pat and Max.

Max shrugged. “You know, I don’t much care for explanations. I’ve found they usually just get in the way.”

Tom looked at Pat, but Ian spoke up first. “I disagree,” he said. “I love explanations. I like to have as many as possible. Then I can choose among them. Or pile them all together. Explanations are easy. We are in the Bermuda Triangle where strange things happen. Dreamers in parallel dimensions are dreaming overlapping dreams. We have tapped into a quantum reality where many possibilities overlap—and the overlapping realities are bleeding through into this one. Why have just one answer when so many are available?”

“But that’s not satisfying,” Pat said.

Ian shrugged. “Maybe not for you. It’s satisfying for me.”

Susan squeezed Tom’s hand under the table. “Reality is a much more flexible concept than most people think,” she said. “The borders are fuzzy. You can do a lot with a little bit of dreaming and a lot of imagination. Isn’t that so, Max?”

Max nodded. “Absolutely,” the writer said.

Tom shook his head. “What about all those cryptic notes?” he asked.

“Not cryptic,” Ian said. “Ambiguous, perhaps, but that’s the nature of the
I Ching.
It offers possibilities. What you do with them is up to you.” He looked a round the table. “As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one question left now. What’s next?” He smiled at Susan. “I wanted to talk to you about that. The ship needs a librarian, you see.”

Apparently, Ian had been busy. It seems that the ship needed a librarian for its winter cruise season in the Mediterranean. Ian had convinced both the Captain and the company that he had found the perfect candidate and now all he had to do was convince her to apply.

Susan listened in a daze. She looked at Tom, who was grinning. “So I’d stay on board the ship?” she said. She’d stay aboard, she’d have a chance to see if this thing with Tom was going anywhere, she’d sail around the Mediterranean and have adventures.

“You’d move to crew quarters, of course,” Ian said. “And you need to fill out an application, but that’s just a formality. It’s all set, really.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I have an apartment in San Francisco. I don’t see …” The sentence trailed off as she thought of the apartment. It wasn’t really her apartment. It was Harrys apartment as far as she was concerned. With Harry’s furniture and Harry’s television and Harry’s stereo. The books were hers, but the rest was Harrys.

“I figured that I could take care of your apartment until you get back,” Pat said.

Ian and Pat talked about details while Susan listened, feeling that matters had been taken from her hands and handed over to someone much more competent. She was willing to give it a try.

Susan sat in the library, reading the end of
Through the Looking-Glass
to a group of children. Alice had returned home and was talking to a black kitten about her adventures on the other side of the looking glass.

“‘Now, Kitty, let’s consider who it was that dreamed it all. This is a serious question, my dear, and you should
not
go on licking your paw like that …! You see, Kitty, it
must
have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course—but then I was part of his dream, too!
Was
it the Red King, Kitty? … Oh, Kitty,
do
help to settle it! I’m sure your paw can wait!’ But the provoking kitten only began on the other paw, and pretended it hadn’t heard the question.”

“Which do you think it was?” Susan closed the book and set it down in her lap. She smiled at the children. “Any ideas?” she asked.

One little boy said it was the Red King and one little girl said it was Alice. Another little girl made a long and earnest speech about her own black kitten back home, which didn’t really seem to relate to the topic at hand. And another boy said he didn’t care whose dream it was but he liked Tweedledum best because he got to put a cooking pot on his head when he dressed up in armor (the illustration showed that), and the little boy thought that was a good idea. The discussion reached no conclusions, which was fine, since Susan hadn’t expected that it would. Some children went with Trudy to the swimming pool, and parents came to reclaim others. One mother stopped to talk with Susan.

“What a wonderful job you have!” the young mother said. Susan nodded. “I certainly do,” she said.

“How on earth did you end up here?” the woman asked.

Susan thought for a moment, watching the woman’s face. “Well,” she said easily, “a month ago I decided to leave my husband and run away to sea. I sailed with the
Odyssey
to Europe. It was such a wonderful trip, I decided to stay aboard.”

There are so many stories to choose from, Susan thought as she watched the mother leave with her children. You had to know when to say, “That’s someone else’s story, not mine.” You had to know when to claim a story as your own, even if it didn’t happen quite that way.

That morning, she had found a piece of paper slipped under her door. A hexagram and a note written in a looping, feminine hand: “When a door has been opened, one can undertake the most dangerous things.”

She didn’t know what would happen next.

I’ve been thinking about my dissertation and thinking about my advisor and thinking about how little I want to deal with defending my ideas to him. I’ve been thinking about Max’s comments on my theories, when he thought they were a science fiction novel.

So I have a plan. I’m going to write a novel. It’ll be about a group of people on board a cruise ship. It’ll be about a writer whose pseudonyms show up and make trouble. It’ll be about reality and the stories people tell and the nature of both.

I think it will be an interesting novel to write. It contains so many possibilities. So far, all I have is the beginning.

A woman is wandering in a corridor, lost and confused. She is on a cruise ship about to set sail. She clutches a map, but the map doesn’t tell her which way to go. In her experience, maps are not always useful. The map is not the territory. In fact, the map rarely shows the most interesting parts of the territory.

As she walks down the corridor, she hears a man talking about writing and talking about names and talking about who he is and who he isn’t. She begins to listen.

That’s all I have so far. I’m sure the rest will become clear in good time.

“The scientists try to tell us that the universe is made up of atoms and molecules; actually, the universe is made up of stories.

—Muriel Rukeyser

Max Merriwell is a fiction writer; Max Merriwell is a liar. So is Mary Maxwell. So is Weldon Merrimax. So is Pat Murphy. And so are you.

We are all fiction writers; we are all liars. Without knowing it, we make up stories about the world. And then we believe that our stories are true and ignore our own roles in creating the version of the world in which we live.

For many years, I worked at the Exploratorium, San Francisco’s museum of science, art, and human perception. My background is in biology, but during my time at the Exploratorium I wrote about all branches of science, including physics and chemistry and human perception. Learning about perception made me realize the fundamental truth of Rukeyser’s statement.

When I came to the Exploratorium, I assumed (like most people, I think) that the world I see around me is the real world. After working at the Exploratorium, I no longer believe that to be true.

I see the world because light bounces off things in the world around me and enters my eyes. The eye’s cornea and lens focus the light to make an image on the retina, a layer of light-sensitive cells at the back of the eye. The cells of the retina send a message to my brain. My brain interprets those signals to create a mental image of the world.

I don’t see the real world. I see a mental image constructed by my brain.

Optical illusions—those tricky pictures where straight lines seem to bend, where sizes are distorted, where your eyes and brain are fooled into seeing the world as it isn’t—reveal some of the limitations of this mental image. At the Exploratorium, you can watch a person shrink as they walk across a distorted room, Also known as the Ames room, this three-dimensional optical illusion was invented by ophthalmologist Adelbert Ames, Jr. in 1934. Your brain expects the room to be rectangular. Unwilling to recognize that the room is an unfamiliar shape, your brain fabricates a plausible story to make sense of what it sees—the person is changing size.

Many people treat optical illusions as amusing tricks, but they are much more. Optical illusions actually reveal the profound workings of your visual system. Researchers into visual perception use these puzzling pictures to figure out how your brain fabricates its fictions about the world.

What you see is your brain’s interpretation of the world. The same is true for what you hear, feel, taste, and smell. All your perceptions are constructions of your brain, stories that your brain tells you about the signals it receives.

What’s more, the same is true of your memories. The work of memory researchers shows that the memory of an event is malleable. Your brain constructs a memory from bits and pieces of what you saw and heard and felt at the time, then modifies that construction based on ideas and suggestions that come along after the event you are remembering has taken place.

Essentially, your memories are stories that your brain tells and retells, rewriting as it goes along. This is something that many people find disturbing. Understandably so. Memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus writes: “Human beings feel attached to their remembered past, for the people, places, and events that we enshrine in memory give structure and definition to the person we think of as our ‘self.’” If we accept that memory spills over into dreams and imagination, then how do we know what’s real and what’s not?

We don’t.

Reality is a slippery thing. According to pataphysical philosopher Yves Rrognac, “The mind is a machine for manufacturing reality.” So reality, in turn, is manufactured by the mind. When I first realized how slippery reality was, I found the discovery to be rather disturbing. But eventually I came to realize that this slipperiness could be the source of a great deal of power and fun. That, I think, is when Max Merriwell, Mary Maxwell, and Weldon Merrimax came along. The book you are holding is the end of a three-year metafictional experiment, which began with
There and Back Again (by Max Merriwell),
continued with
Wild Angel (by Mary Maxwell by Max Merriwell),
and culminated in
Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell.

Though I have had a great deal of fun playing with reality in this book, I have maintained a certain respect for the laws of physics. The science described by Pat Murphy (the character) in her Bad Grrlz’ Guide is accurate. I did not make up any of the stuff about virtual particles popping in and out of the quantum vacuum. The physicists made that up on their own.

This book is the end of a long process and many people helped me along the way.

The crew of Princess Cruises’
Dawn Princess
made my voyage with them quite enjoyable. Captain Attilio Guerrini, First Engineer Officer Martin Ross, and Security Officer Jimmy Green were kind enough to spare time from their busy schedules to tell me about their work.

Karen Fowler, Angus MacDonald, Daniel Marcus, Carter Scholz, Michael Berry, Richard Russo, Michael Blumlein, Ellen Klages, Richard Kadrey, Paul Doherty, Linda Shore, and Avon Swofford took the time to read and thoughtfully comment on all or part of this manuscript. I could not have completed this project without their help. Laurie Brandt offered support and insight along the way. My friend Gary Crounse provided a pataphysical point of view upon request, an attitude that proved invaluable in completing this project.

I want to thank Bad Girls Ellen Klages and Linda Shore for the good times we shared while working on the proposal for the Exploratorium’s Bad Girls’ Guide to Science. I hope someday we get to write the book! Special thanks to Ellen Klages for the memorable evening we spent inventing the recipe for the Flaming Rum Monkey, a dangerous drink for dangerous women.

I thank my husband, Dave Wright, who provided love and support throughout this long project. I thank Beth Meacham, my editor at Tor Books, for being courageous enough to see this project through to the end, publishing each book in turn, never wavering from the course. I thank Betsy Mitchell and Open Road Media for republishing my books in electronic form. And I thank all my readers for coming along for the ride.