Other Worlds Than These

I’m trembling. You reach out a hand and touch me, and it’s like a world of ice breaking up inside, and I start to cry. “Love, what’s wrong?”

Which is when I walk into the room.

Again.

The two of me stare at each other. At first, to be honest, I don’t make the connection. I just think: There’s something odd about this man. Strangest damn guy I ever did see, and I can’t figure out why. All those movies and television shows where somebody is suddenly confronted by his exact double and goes slack-jawed with shock? Lies, the batch of them. He doesn’t look a bit like the way I picture myself.

“Johnny?” Katherine says in a strangled little voice. But she’s not looking at me but at the other guy and he’s staring at me in a bemused kind of way, as if there’s something strange and baffling about me, and then all of a sudden the dime drops.

He’s me.

He’s me and he’s not getting it anymore than I was. “Katherine?” he says. “Who is this?”

A very long evening later, I find myself lying on the couch under a blanket with pillows beneath my head. Upstairs, Katherine and the other me are arguing. His voice is low and angry. Hers is calm and reasonable, but he doesn’t like what it says. It was my wallet that convinced her: the driver’s license identical to his in every way, the credit and library and insurance cards, all the incidental pieces of identification one picks up along the way, and every single one of them exactly the same as his.

Save for the fact that his belong to a man whose wife is still alive.

I don’t know exactly what you’re saying up there, but I can guess at the emotional heart of it. You love me. This is, in a sense, my house. I have nowhere else to go. You are not about to turn me out.

Meanwhile, I—the me upstairs, I mean—am angry and unhappy about my being here at all. He knows me better than you do, and he doesn’t like me one-tenth as much. Knowing that there’s no way you could tell us apart, he is filled with paranoid fantasies. He’s afraid I’m going to try to take his place.

Which, if I could, I most certainly would. But that would probably require my killing him and I’m not sure I could actually kill a man. Even if that man was myself. And how could I possibly hope to square it with Katherine? I’m in uncharted territory here. I have no idea what might or might not happen.

For now, though, it’s enough to simply hear your voice. I ignore the rest and close my eyes and smile.

A car rumbles down the road outside and then abruptly stops. As do the voices above. All other noises cease as sharply as if somebody has thrown a switch.

Puzzled, I get up from the couch.

Out of nowhere, strong hands seize my arms. There’s a man standing to the right of me and another to the left. They both wear white jumpsuits, which I understand now to be a kind of uniform. They wear the same badge —a fan of arrows radiant from a common locus—as the man I saw strangling in the air.

“We’re sorry, sir,” says one. “We saw you trying to help our comrade, and we appreciate that. But you’re in the wrong place and we have to put you back.”

“You’re time travelers or something, aren’t you?” I ask.

“Or something,” the second one says. He’s holding onto my right arm. With his free hand he opens a kind of pod floating in the air beside him. An equipment bag, I think. It’s filled with devices which seem to be only half there. A gleaming tube wraps itself around my chest, another around my forehead. “But don’t worry. We’ll have everything set right in just a jiff.”

Then I twig to what’s going on.

“No,” I say. “She’s here, don’t you understand that? I’ll keep my mouth shut, I won’t say anything to anyone ever, I swear. Only let me stay. I’ll move to another city, I won’t bother anybody. The two upstairs will think they had some kind of shared hallucination. Only please, for God’s sake, let me exist in a world where Katherine’s not dead.”

There is a terrible look of compassion in the man’s eyes. “Sir. If it were possible, we would let you stay.”

“Done,” says the other. The world goes away.

So I return to my empty house. I pour myself a glass of wine and stare at it for a long, long time. Then I get up and pour it into the sink.

A year passes.

It’s night and I’m standing in our tiny urban backyard, Katherine, looking up at the stars and a narrow sliver of moon. Talking to you. I know you can’t hear me. But I’ve been thinking about that strange night ever since it happened, and it seems to me that in an infinite universe, all possibilities are manifest in an eternal present. Somewhere you’re happy, and that makes me glad. In countless other places, you’re a widow and heartbroken. Surely one of you at least is standing out in the back yard, like I am now, staring up at the moon and imagining that I’m saying these words. Which is why I’m here. So it will be true.

I don’t really have much to say, I’m afraid. I just want you to know I still love you and that I’m doing fine. I wasn’t, for a while there. But just knowing you’re alive somehow, however impossibly far away, is enough to keep me going.

You’re never really dead, I know that now.

And if it makes you feel any better, neither am I.

TWENTY-TWO CENTIMETERS GREGORY BENFORD

Gregory Benford has published more than thirty books, mostly novels, of which nearly all remain in print, some after a quarter of a century. His fiction has won many awards, including the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape. A winner of the United Nations Medal for Literature, he is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, was Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and in 1995 received the Lord Prize for contributions to science. A fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, he continues his research in both astrophysics and plasma physics.

The Counter-Universe was dim. The Counter-Earth below them had a gray grandeur— lightly banded in pale pewter and salmon red, save where the shrunken Moon cast its huge gloomy shadow. Here the Moon clung close to the Counter-Earth, in a universe chilling toward absolute zero.

Julie peered out at a universe cooling into extinction. Below their orbit hung the curve of Counter-Earth, its night side lit by the pale Counter-Moon. Both these were lesser echoes of the “real” Earth-Moon system, a universe away—or twenty-two centimeters, whichever came first.

Massive ice sheets spread like pearly blankets from both poles. Ridges ribbed the frozen methane ranges. The equatorial land was a flinty, scarred ribbon of ribbed black rock, hemmed in by the oppressive ice. The planet turned almost imperceptibly, a major ridgeline just coming into view at the dawn line.

Julie sighed and brought their craft lower. Al sat silent beside her. Yet they both knew that all of Earthside— the real Earth, she still thought—listened and watched through their minicams.

“The focal point is coming into sunlight ’bout now,” Al reported.

“Let’s go get it,” she whispered. This gloomy universe felt somber, awesome.

They curved toward the dawn line. Data hummed in their board displays, spatters of light reporting on the gravitational pulses that twisted space here.

They had already found the four orbiting gravitational wave radiators, just as predicted by the science guys. Now for the nexus of those four, down on the surface. The focal point, the coordinator of the grav wave transmissions that had summoned them here.