Yellow Blue Tibia (43 page)

‘One reality is a narrow pipe: but a bundle of forty thousand, give or take . . . that’s a broader pipe. Accumulate them altogether and the flow is . . . Ah, but, look! The bullet went through you, and no ill effects.’

I looked round. The bullet was now a beachball of smoke, or the ghost of one of those knots of tumbleweed that rolls along the street in a Western movie. Or, as I watched, a mere sphere of mist, expanding and disappearing.

‘I wasn’t shot?’

‘You
were
shot, in that realityline. But when you consolidate all forty thousand, given that you weren’t shot in the vast majority, then the average is . . .’ He seemed to lose interest in his explanation. His finger was in his beard.

‘You’re saying I was shot in the particular, but that
on average
I wasn’t shot?’

‘That’s a good way of putting it.’

‘I’m immune?’

‘The probability of you being killed, in this lamination, is very low.’

‘Lamination?’

He winced. ‘Not a very good way of putting it, I know. Do you know what quantum physics is?’ Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov asked me.

‘He knows
shit
,’ splurged Frenkel, from his wheelchair.

‘I know a little,’ I corrected.

‘Copenhagen fuck!’ Frenkel slurmed. ‘I wish we’d written that the aliens
blew up
Copenhagen, all those years ago. Fucking Copenhagen.’

‘A blameless town,’ I objected.

‘Blameless?
Fucking quantum
physics.’

‘Destroying Copenhagen would hardly alter the facts of the quantum universe,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov.

There was something disorienting happening in my inner ear. There was a faint dazzle, like solar glare over a camera’s convex glass eye, in my sense of the city. It was all happening at once. It wasn’t happening at all. It wasn’t happening at all, or it was all happening at once, or there was some other, third thing.

‘Every event that can happen more than one way,’ Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov was saying, ‘happens more than one way. You might think that would lead to a multiverse of near infinite complexity.’

‘
I
wouldn’t think anything of the sort, comrade,’ I said, mildly.

‘The reason it
doesn’t
,’ he went on, ‘is that many of these branching alternatives cancel one another out. Over the broader fan of possibilities, spreading into a complex delta-basin of alternate realities, probability creates reality gradients. Realities below a certain threshold are liable to evaporate altogether. Realities above a certain threshold can solidify in an absolute sense. It’s chance, you see, but also observation. That’s the Copenhagen part.’

‘
Fucking
Copenhagen,’ growled Frenkel.

‘And some consciousnesses are more gifted with that solidifying effectiveness than others.’

‘Dora
fucking
Norman,’ snapped Frenkel. ‘Fuck!
Fucking
fuck!’

But there is still a broad range of alternative realities co-existing. Universes in which you were blown up and died in Chernobyl - lots of them. The universe in which you survived is a tenuous one, in terms of probability. If the Norman woman had not perceived you as strongly as she did - does - then you’d have died there. And his beard danced and waggled as he spoke: all the long black lines extruded from those little hair-pits on his chin and cheeks and upper lip, all grown out and matted and packed together.

‘You’re very well informed,’ I said. ‘About my life.’

‘We have a good perspective upon it.’ He twirled fingers in his beard again. ‘You can see, our technology gives us access to this realm of - superposition.’

‘That’s the ground on which they’re fucking invading us!’ screeched Frenkel, slobber scattering. ‘This one! This ground!
That’s
why it’s so hard to, fucking, pin them down.’

I looked over at Frenkel. ‘You ought to calm yourself, Jan.’

‘That’s what I was trying to fucking tell you in that park in Kiev! Look up!’

I looked up. The sky was full of flying saucers, from horizon to horizon. There were alien spacecraft everywhere, and descending directly above our heads was a craft bigger than all the rest: the pupil of a colossal eye, the radial iris spokes of grey and dark green against a dark blue background, a shield-boss kilometres in diameter framing it. The air was shuddered by the thrum of its impossible engines. It might descend inexorably and crush central Moscow - I didn’t know. It was possible I could see clouds through the main body of the thing. I wasn’t sure.

‘[Good gracious,]’ I said, lapsing, for some reason, into English.

‘Fuck!’ yelled Frenkel, spit coming from his mouth in pearls. ‘Fuck! This is the ground they’re invading us over!’

‘This.’ I looked around. ‘It’s more than one reality, it’s the whole sheaf of possible realities?’

‘A good spread of them. As many as we can coalesce. And the bullet that passed through your chest - that’s a very weak reality, when diluted by all the rest. Very weak.’

‘Weak because?’

‘Isn’t it obvious ! Because in most of the rest you died in Chernobyl ! And in the realities in which you died in Chernobyl, there’s no need for Nik here—’ but Nik was
barely
here: he was vaguer than the dream to the waker - ‘to follow you across Moscow and put a bullet in your chest.’

‘So - he didn’t shoot me?’

‘Of course he fucking shot you!’ slurred Frenkel.

‘He shot you in one thread. In forty thousand other threads he didn’t shoot you. So if you’re worrying whether you’ve been shot and killed by Nik . . . you need to know which thread you’re in.’

‘Fucking fuck,’ Frenkel interjected, with no very obvious pertinence.

‘I’m still alive,’ I said, running my hand across my chest. ‘So I suppose I wasn’t in that thread.’

‘You were in that thread,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov. ‘But you were in forty thousand other threads as well, at the same time, and in those forty thousand you weren’t shot. The ones in which you live diluted the one in which you die to the point where . . . Well, look I don’t want to strain the point. You see what I’m saying.’

I looked at my feet. They looked weirdly solid against the fluctuating, pulsing, darkly luminous pavement. Good Moscow stone. The ground interested me less as metaphysics, and more as - I don’t know. The grave, I supposed. The space opened by pressing the hidden latch-switch, visible only by moonlight, and lifting one of the great pavement slabs up and out, a horizontal door. Those steps lead down . . . where do they lead, exactly? ‘I don’t see,’ I said.

‘I see,’ I said.

‘I don’t see,’ I said, ‘how I’m suddenly living forty thousand and one realitylines simultaneously. Is it that - what? Is that
normal
?’

‘Fuck!’ gargled Frenkel. He sounded like he was choking on something. His own rage.

‘That’s not normal. It’s normal to live one realityline, of course. Our consciousnesses work that way; they slide effortlessly left, right, whichever, down all the frictionless cleavages and reunions of possibilities. We never even notice them.’

‘I don’t see,’ I said. Then I said, ‘No, I don’t see.’

‘You’re wondering,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov, his beard shuddering like a live thing, like a beard of black bees, ‘given that your natural habitat is a single realityline, how you can be presently living in the full spread of forty thousand?’

‘I’m wondering that,’ I agreed.

‘Fucking! Fuh-fuh-fuh!’ interjected Frenkel, and then he sneezed. It made his body writhe like an eel in its chair. He almost fell out.

‘You want to know how we are doing it?’ Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov asked. ‘So look up.’

I looked up again. Directly above us, now no more than a thousand yards up, was the main, vast alien spacecraft. It looked like a huge inverted cymbal made of pig-iron: so broad it stretched wider than the eye could take in. A mind accustomed to seeing large things in the sky thinks, automatically,
cloud:
and a shape this big put me in mind of rain clouds first of all - a perfectly circular rain cloud with a vast eye in its centre. But there was no doubting its prodigious solidity. There was all manner of intricate griddle and porthole detail in the underside. It was not rotating, but around its bulging black-blister middle - that central dome alone was more than a hundred metres across, I think - strips of radial illumination, not sharp-edged but not exactly fuzzy either, moved clockwise very slowly: yellow and red ones, blue and white ones. The exact middle of the central dome, like an inverted nipple, was a ridged cavity.

My feelings were of awe.

I tried to breathe in, but my lungs felt like polythene bags, and my mouth was dry. The thought kept running through my head: how could I not have noticed!

Frenkel was coughing furiously in his chair. Either that, or he was having a conniption fit.

‘It takes, I don’t mind telling you, enormous amounts of energy even to maintain the co-presence of a relatively small spread, like the forty thousand we’re in now. And even a ship as large as,’ he pointed up with his finger, ‘as that one can’t do it indefinitely. Do you remember being intercepted on the road to Moscow?’

I did remember. Of course I did. ‘That happened,’ I said, dumbly.

‘That craft, that intercepted you,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov. It was even bigger than the one up there. It had even more powerful . . . I suppose,
engines
is the best word. That craft put out a spread of about eighty-thousand threads, but even that, with all the power we could muster - even that we could only maintain for a short time. And that was because
she
was in the car. Do you start to understand?’

‘I
did
see a UFO on that road,’ I said, feeling foolish.

‘Yes.’

‘And, at the same time - I didn’t. At the same time, we dropped the soldier off at that brothel and drove on.’

‘Yes.’

I looked up at the staggering, enormous object sitting in mid-air directly above us. It was incredible. It was certainly there, though.

‘And now she’s not here . . .’

‘She’s being flown, dispatch, back to America. She’s in the plane now, waiting for take-off.’

Frenkel pulled himself up in his chair. ‘I fucking told you. Look around, Konsty!
This
is where they’re invading! Not Russia, or Ukraine, or America - here. This is why they’re simultaneously such a genuine threat and why they’re so hard to spot! Because their main battle front isn’t in one reality, but - here. In this fucking manyspace. This fucking manyspacetime.’

With a slightly sticky movement, as if wading through a resisting medium, Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov took a step towards me, and laid his hand on my arm.

‘Oh, garoo, garoo,’ cried Frenkel. ‘Don’t you fucking . . . don’t you fucking
walk off
with
him
. . .’

‘Come along Konstantin Andreiovich,’ said Asterinov. ‘Just a little walk round the corner. I’m not abducting you. We’ve intervened for a good reason. We’ve intervened at my insistence, actually.’

‘What’s round the corner?’

‘Round the corner is a better place to be when the spread is collapsed back down to a single realityline again. Because once that happens, and Nik sees that he has not managed to shoot you dead with his first bullet, he’ll shoot again. Won’t he! So, better not to be directly in front of his gun.’

‘Round the corner,’ I said, taking an awkward step myself, and then another, with Asterinov’s still-young hand tucked into my elbow. ‘To stay alive.’

‘Yes.’

‘You intervened to save my life?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because we were friends, all those decades ago?’

Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov’s beard moved, and I wondered if perhaps he was smiling. ‘It would be nice to think that,’ he said.

‘Don’t! Oh, garoo! Garoo!’ shrieked Frenkel, his arms flailing. ‘Don’t fucking
walk off
with him. He’s the enemy, Konsty!’ But soon we had left him behind and were moving on. ‘Fucking
Copenhagen
!’ he yelled. ‘
Fucking
Copenhagen!’

 

The corner, when we came to it, shimmered and bulged, and we went round it, and walked in silence for a while, until, suddenly, everything snapped abruptly and rather bafflingly into familiarity again. The buildings acquired sharp-edged lucidity. People filled out their own spectral shapes.

I looked up, but the sky was empty. Instead of a huge alien spacecraft ceilinging the view there was nothing but a quantity of grey-blue sky.

‘I wish it were true,’ Asterinov was saying, ‘that I intervened to save your life, Konstantin Andreiovich, for old times’ sake. Indeed I remember that time in the dacha! Good memories. But, no, we intervened not for your sake. But because of Dora Norman. She is remarkable.’

‘I know.’

‘Her ability is . . . important. We need to understand it better. Her line is now tangled up with yours. It’s pretty much as simple as that.’

‘You’re the enemy,’ I said.

‘We’re the good guys, Konstantin Andreiovich,’ he replied, his beard splitting with a wide smile. ‘You’re the enemy.’

‘Now that I understand the particular . . . territories you are moving over, I comprehend the particular reasons why UFO sightings have been so problematic,’ I told him. I told
it
, I should say. ‘So widely reported and believed and simultaneously so widely unseen and disbelieved.’

‘The invasion is pretty much over, friend,’ it said to me. ‘It’s been four decades since we met in that dacha.’

‘You were one of them, even then?’

It laughed. ‘You were a
human
, even then?’ he retorted.

‘But what were we . . . what were we
doing
?’

‘We were crafting a realityline. We were preparing the ground for my people. We were . . . think of it as, clearing the undergrowth. Think of it as laying a path through possibilities. We were creating the spine of a realityline.’