what is always, in a very narrow sense, Him.
“Are we finished?” the Authority asks.
“When I found you,” The Divine One begins. Then He sighs, correcting Himself. “When My agents of discovery built the first quantum-piercing machines, and I reached into the optional universes… and found you waiting for Me…”
“Yes?”
“I was intrigued. And furious. Since I am just one existence inside an incalculable vastness…well, I felt righteously pissed…”
“And intrigued,” the Authority repeats.
“Deeply. Relentlessly.” With a decidedly human gesture, He shrugs. “How many years have we been meeting this way?”
An astonishing number is offered.
“It has been a rewarding friendship,” He claims. “Lonely gods need a good companion or two.”
Silence.
“Tell Me. And be honest now.” The god smiles, asking, “How many of My genotypes are learning from My lessons? As I stand here, as I breathe, how many of Them are taking what I give them and then setting out to conquer Their own little worlds?”
“I cannot give a number,” the Authority replies.
“But there is a multitude! Isn’t that so?”
“Many,” the voice concedes. “Yes—”
The Divine One launches into a roaring laugh, the sound swelling until the Great Temple quivers and crumbles, dust and slabs of rock falling on all sides.
“Until later,” He promises.
“Until always,” the Authority purrs.
One of the more difficult concepts—one that can still astonish after a lifetime of study and hard thought—is that fact that your parents are not always your parents. Probability and wild coincidence will always find ways to create you. A couple makes love, each donating half of their genetic material to the baby. If each parent happens to contain half of your particular genes, who is to say that you can’t be the end result? Or perhaps, parents consciously tweak their embryo’s genetics, aiming for some kind of enhancement and getting you in the bargain. Or there is the less likely Earth where cloning is the norm and you are a temporarily popular child, millions of you born in a single year. And then there is an even more peculiar Earth where you have been built from scratch inside someone’s laboratory, synthetic genes stitched together by entities that aren’t in the littlest bit human.
The salient point is that your parents don’t have to be your parents, and frankly, in the vast majority of cases, they are not.
Which implies, if you follow that same relentless logic, that the grandparents and history are even less likely to remain yours.
In three days, Josh will be twenty-six years old.
He sits with his parents, eating their pot roast. When he was a boy, back in the days when meat bled and mothers cooked, their Sunday roasts were always dry as sawdust. But even though his mother has a fully modern kitchen, her cultured roast has still been tortured to a dusty brown gristle. This must be how they like it, Josh decides. Old people, he thinks dismissively. They can never change, can they? Shaking his head, Josh cuts at the tough meat, and his mother asks, “What are you doing?”
“Eating,” he growls.
“That isn’t what she means,” his father snaps.
“I mean with your life,” she says. Then with a practiced exasperation, she reminds him, “We’ve always had such hopes for you, dear.”
Josh drops his knife and fork, staring at the opposite wall.
“You always had such promise, honey.”
The young man sighs heavily. Why did he believe this night would go any other way?
“Bullshit,” says his father. “It’s bullshit. You’re wasting your life, playing around with that goddamn Authority…!”
“Yeah, well,” mutters Josh. “It’s my life.”
“You don’t see
“It’s not that often.” Josh shakes his head, explaining, “There aren’t enough facilities for the demand, and there won’t ever be. That’s how it’s rationed. Once every six weeks is the most I can manage.”
“And then what?” Mother whines. “All day and night, you play with your treasures. Isn’t that right?”
Josh reaches under the dining room table.
“And don’t give me your bullshit about leading a contemplative life,” Father warns, a thick finger stabbing in his direction. “I don’t want to hear how you’re getting in touch with your genius and the rest of that bullshit!”
If Josh had doubts or second thoughts, they just vanished. Silently, with a cold precision, he opens the envelope and sets out portraits, arranging them in rows on the dining table. Ten, twenty, thirty pictures in all. In each image, some version of Josh smiling at the unseen camera. In each, a different set of parents smile with an honest warmth, loving hands draped across his shoulders or running their fingers through his hair. Clothes vary, and the backgrounds. In one image, Saturn and its silvery rings halfway fill the sky. But what matters is what remains unchanged—the seamless, loving joy of proud parents and their very happy son.
Josh’s parents aren’t idiots; they know exactly what he is showing them.
“Now leave me alone,” Josh snaps, backing away from the table. “I mean it! Stay out of my life!”
What happens next—what will gnaw at him for years—is the weeping. Not from his mother, who simply looks sad and a little deflated. No, it’s Father who bursts into tears, fists rubbing hard at eyes and a stupid, stupid blubbering coming from someplace deep and miserable.
A person with your genetics can emerge in any century, any eon. You might be a general in Napoleon’s army, or the first human to reach Alpha Centauri, or a talented shaman in the Age of Flint.
Even your world is subject to the same whims and caprices.
Stare into the deepest reaches of the gray ocean, gaze past every little blue Earth, and you realize that the basic beginnings of humanity can emerge from a host of alternate hominids, and from myriad cradle-worlds that only look and taste and feel like this insignificant home of yours.
Josh is in his early thirties.
Age is supposedly meaningless now. Aging is a weakness and a disease left behind in more cramped, less brilliant times. But most people who reach their thirties still start to sense the weight of their years, and with experience, they suffer those first nagging thoughts about limits and death and the great nothingness that lies beyond.
“Three gifts, please.”
This could be the same room as the first room. It is not, but the look of the place is exactly the same: a door, and white walls, and three make-portals. The gray ocean still lies at his feet. The Authority’s voice is quiet and insistent, and perfectly patient. Josh continues to visit every six weeks; a pattern has evolved and calcified. He brings the same ragged gym bag with the same three basic offerings. He has a comprehensive journal of his last forty-two days. He has written a story or poem into which he has put some small measure of work. And with a digital recorder, he has captured an hour of his life: A sexual interlude, oftentimes. A wedding or swap party, on occasion. Or like today, an hour of nothing but Josh speaking to the camera, trying to explain to an unseen audience what it means to be him.
Again, the Authority asks, “Do you have three gifts?”
Josh nods, and hesitates.
“I was wondering,” he mutters. “How likely is it…that someone else actually notices what I’ve done here…?”
Silence.
