Other Worlds Than These

“And you have the chair fragments.”

“Well, no.”

“What! You threw them out?”

“My best guess is that they threw them out. Or else, I don’t know, when the chair lost its structure, the echo faded. Anyway, the pieces are gone.”

“No evidence. That clinches it. If you publish this I’ll deny it, Beto.”

“No you won’t.”

“I will. I’ve already had my face damaged. I’m not going to let you shatter my career as well. Beto, drop it!”

“I can’t! This is too important! Science can’t continue to refuse to look at this and find out what’s really going on!”

“Yes it can! Scientists regularly refuse to look at all kinds of things because it would be bad for their careers to see them! You know it’s true!”

“Yes. I know it’s true. Scientists can be blind. But not me. And not you either, Leonard. When I publish this, I know you’ll tell the truth.”

“If you publish this, I’ll know you’re crazy. So when people ask me, I’ll tell them the truth—that you’re crazy. The chair is gone now anyway. Chances are this will never happen again. In five years you’ll come to think of it as a weird hallucination.”

“A weird hallucination that left you scarred for life.”

“Go away, Beto. Leave me alone.”

2186

“I call it the Angler, and using it is called Angling.”

“It looks expensive.”

“It is.”

“Too expensive to sell it as a toy.”

“It’s not for children anyway. Look, it’s expensive because it’s really high-tech, but that’s a plus, and the more popular it becomes, the more the per-unit cost will drop. We’ve studied the price point and we think we’re right on this.”

“OK, fine, what does it do.”

“I’ll show you. Put on this cap and—”

”I certainly will not! Not until you tell me what it does.”

“Sure, I understand, no problem. What it does is, it puts you into someone else’s head.”

“Oh, it’s just a Dreamer, those have been around for years, they had their vogue but—”

“No, not a Dreamer. True, we do use the old Dreamer technology as the playback system, because why reinvent the wheel? We were able to license it for a song, so why not? But the thing that makes this special is this—the recording system.”

“Recording?”

“You know about slantspace, right?”

“That’s all theoretical games.”

“Not really just theoretical. I mean, it’s well known that our brains store memory in slantspace, right?”

“Sure, yeah. I knew that.”

“Well, see, here’s the thing. There’s an infinite number of different universes that have a lot of their matter coterminous with ours—”

“Here it comes, engineer talk, we can’t sell engineering babble.”

“There are people in these other worlds. Like ghosts. They wander around, and their memories are stored in our world.”

“Where?”

“Just sitting there in the air. Just a collection of angles. Wherever their head is, in our world and a lot of other parallel worlds, they have their memories stored as a pattern of slants. Haven’t you had the experience of walking into a room and then suddenly you can’t remember why you came in?”

“I’m seventy years old, it happens all the time.”

“It has nothing to do with being seventy. It happened when you were young, too. Only you’re more susceptible now, because your own brain has so much memory stored that it’s constantly accessing other slants. And sometimes, your head space passes through the head space of someone else in another world, and poof, your thoughts are confused—jammed, really—by theirs.”

“My head just happens to pass through the space where the other guy’s head just happens to be?”

“In an infinite series of universes, there are a lot of them where people about your height might be walking around. What makes it so rare is that most of them are using patterns of slants so different that they barely impinge on ours at all. And you have to be accessing memory right at that moment, too. Anyway, that’s not what matters—that is coincidence. But you set up this recorder here at about the height of a human being and turn it on, and as long as you don’t put it, say, on the thirtieth floor or the bottom of a lake or something, within a day you’ll have this thing filled up.”

“With what?”

“Up to twenty separate memory states. We could build it to hold a lot more, but it’s so easy to erase and replace that we figured twenty was enough and if people want more, we can sell peripherals, right? Anyway, you get these transitory brain states. Memories. And it’s the whole package, the complete mental state of another human being for one moment in time. Not a dream. Not fictionalized, you know? Those dreams, they were sketchy, haphazard, pretty meaningless. I mean, it’s boring to hear other people tell their dreams, how cool is it to actually have to sit through them? But with the Angler, you catch the whole fish. You’ve got to put it on, though, to know why it’s going to sell.”

“And it’s nothing permanent.”

“Well, it’s permanent in the sense that you’ll remember it, and it’ll be a pretty strong memory. But you know, you’ll want to remember it so that’s a good thing. It doesn’t damage anything, though, and that’s all that matters. I can try it on one of your employees first, though, if you want. Or I’ll put it on myself.”

“No, I’ll do it. I’ll have to do it in the end before I’ll make the decision, so I might as well do it from the start. Put on the cap. And no, it’s not a toupee, if I were going to get a rug I’d choose a better one than this.”

“All right, a snug fit, but that’s why we made it elastic.”

“How long does it take?”

“Objective time, only a fraction of a second. Subjectively, of course, well, you tell us. Ready?”

“Sure. Give me a one, two, three, all right?”

“I’ll do one, two, three, and then flip it like four. OK?”

“Yeah yeah. Do it.”

“One. Two. Three.”

“Ah… aaah. Oh.”

“Give it a few seconds. Just relax. It’s pretty strong.”

“You didn’t… how could this… I…”

“It’s all right to cry. Don’t worry. First time, most people do.”

“I was just… She’s just… I was a woman.”

“Fifty-fifty chance.”

“I never knew how it felt to… This should be illegal.”

“Technically, it falls under the same laws as the Dreamer, so, you know, not for children and all that.”

“I don’t know if I’d ever want to use it again. It’s so strong.”