“Sure. The novel based onPride and Prejudice was on the bestseller list?”
Michelle said, “Hooray for Hollywood,” and Ivan raised his bottle in a toast.
Don raised his as well. “Here’s to L.A., Los Angeles del Muerte!”
Then Michelle excused herself and went inside. Ivan said, “Every time I see her, she’s bigger, smarter, prettier, and nicer.”
“That’s how it works if you only see her once every few years. Move out here, be her doting uncle all the time.”
“Oh, I would love to. It would be good to see more of you, too. But-” To avoid his brother’s expectant look, Ivan turned toward the canyon. “Call me a crank on the subject, but I’ll never live on an active plate margin.”
“Christ.”
“Geologically speaking, these hills have all the structural integrity of head cheese. They piled up here after drifting in across a prehistoric sea from God knows where. One of these times, Don, the earth’s going to hiccup, and all these nice houses and all you nice people in them are going to slide all the way down that canyon.”
Don shrugged. “Mobility is what California’s all about. Everything here is from someplace else. The water comes from Colorado. These flowers,” and he extended his arm and delicately touched a leaf on one of the bird-of- paradise flowers as though he were stroking a cat under its jaw, “are South African.
The jacaranda you see all over town are from Brazil, the eucalyptus trees are from Australia. The people and the architecture are from everywhere you can think of.” He took a long pull on his bottle, draining it.
“That’s the reason California’s such a weird goddamn place. Because nothing really belongs here.”
“I think it’s fascinating. I wouldn’t live here for anything-not even for you and Michelle, I’m sorry. But it is certainly fascinating.”
“Oh, absolutely, I agree, it is. In a big, ugly, tasteless, intellectually numbing kind of way.”
“What do you do for intellectual stimulation?”
“I read your monographs.”
“Really?”
“No, but I have copies of all of them.”
Later, stretched across the bed with his eyes closed and the cool fresh sheet pulled up to his sternum, Ivan thought, Clever, talented Don. It had never occurred to him before that his brother considered his work at all…
He did not think he had fallen asleep, yet he awoke with a start. He was hot and parched. He slipped into a robe and eased into the hallway. In the kitchen, he filled a glass with cold filtered water from the jug in the refrigerator and sat down with his back to the bar to look out through the glass doors, at the lights of the city. There was a glowing patch of sky, seemingly as distant as the half moon, where the dark smudgy cloud had been that afternoon.
When he returned to his room, he sat on the edge of the bed and took his well-thumbedPeople’s Almanac from the nightstand. He opened it at random and read a page, then set it aside and picked up the laptop. “Where were we?”
The screen lightened. “That’s a good question,” Cutsinger was saying. He chuckled into the microphones. “I know, because my colleagues and I have asked it of each other thousands of times since the anomaly was discovered. Every time, the answer’s been the same. Simply traveling through time into the past is impossible. Simply to do so violates the laws of physics, especially our old favorite, the second law of thermodynamics. Simply to enter the past is to alter the past, which is a literal and actual contradiction of logic. Yet the fact is, we have discovered this space-time anomaly which connects our immediate present with what from all evidence is the Earth as it existed during mid-Paleozoic times. The only way the laws of physics and logic can accommodate this awkward fact is if we quietly deep-six the adjective ‘simply’ and run things out to their extremely complicated conclusion. We must posit a universe that stops and starts, stops and starts, countless billions of times per microsecond, as it jumps from state to state. As it does so, it continually divides, copies itself. Each copy is in a different state-that is, they’re inexact copies. A separate reality exists for every possible outcome of every possible quantum interaction. Inasmuch as the number of copies produced since the Big Bang must be practically infinite, the range of difference among the realities must be practically infinite as well. These realities exist in parallel with one another. Whatever we insert into the anomaly-probes, test animals, human beings-are not simply going to travel directly backward into our own past. Instead, they’re going to travel somehow to another universe, to another Earth which resembles our Earth as it was in the Paleozoic. Yes? Question?”
From offscreen came a question, inaudible to Ivan, but on the screen Cutsinger nodded and answered, “Well, it’s probably pointless to say whether this sort of travel occurs in any direction-backward, sideward, or diagonally.”
From offscreen, someone else asked, “If there are all these multiple Earths, when you’re ready to come back through this hole you’re talking about, how can you be sure you’ll find your way back to the right Earth?”
“To the very best of our knowledge, this hole as you call it has only two ends. One here and now, one there and then. Next question?”
You glibson of a bitch, Ivan thought.
After the robot probes had gone and apparently come back through the space-time anomaly, the next step was obvious to everyone: human beings must follow. It was decided that two people should go through together. At the outset, in the moment it had taken the phrase “time travel to the prehistoric world” to register in his mind, Ivan had made up his mind-yes, absolutely, I want to go! “Presented with the opportunity to traverse time and explore a prehistoric planet,” he had written to Don, “whowouldn’t? ” In the weeks and months that followed, however, through all the discussion and planning sessions, he had never quite believed that he had a real chance to go. Partly it was a matter of funding: x amount of money in the kitty simply equaled y number of people who would get to go on any Paleozoic junket.
Partly it was a matter of prestige: given, practically speaking, an entire new planet to explore-everything about it, everything about the cosmos it occupied, for that matter, being four hundred million years younger, any scientist could make a case for his or her particular field of inquiry. Ivan did not, of course, despise his work in the least or see any need to apologize for it; moreover, he did not take personally-too personally, anyway-one or another of the likelier candidates’ feigned confusion over pedology, the study of the nature and development of children, andpedology, soil science. The first few times, he affected amusement at the joke fellow soil scientists told on themselves, which in its simplest form was that the insertion of a single soil scientist into Silurian time would result in that remote geological period’s having more scientist than soil. It was the sort of extremely specialized joke specialists told. Like any specialized joke, its charm vanished the instant that an explanation became necessary. Real soil would have only just started, geologically speaking, to collect amid the Silurian barrens; pedogenesis would be spotty and sporadic; rock could weather away to fine particles, but only the decay of organic matter could make sterile grit into nurturing dirt, and while organisms abounded in the Silurian seas, they would have only just started, again, geologically speaking, to live and die-and decompose-on land.
“Oh. I see. Ha, ha.”
The joke had escaped from the soil scientists at some point and begot tortuous variations in which twenty- first-century pedology overwhelmed and annihilated the reality of primordial soil: why (went one version), the weight of the terminology alone-soil air, soil complexes, associations and series, soil horizons, moisture budgets, aggregates and peds, mor and mull and all the rest of it-would be too much for such thin, poor, fragile stuff as one might expect to find sprinkled about in mid-Paleozoic times.
He had tried to look and sound amused, and to be a good sport overall, whenever he heard the joke in any of its mutated forms. After all, it was never intended really maliciously; it merely partook of a largely unconscious acceptance of a hierarchy of scientists. Physics and astronomy were glamour fields. Geology and paleontology were comparatively rough-hewn but nonetheless logical choices; moreover, they were perennially popular with the public, a crucial concern when public money was involved. Pedology was none of the above. He liked to think that he did not have it in himself to be envious, and so, with unfailing good humor, he agreed that there certainly would be a lot of geology at hand in the Paleozoic, mountains, valleys, strata, and the like. And, as for paleozoology, the Paleozoic would be nothing if not a big aquarium stocked with weird wiggly things and maybe a few big showy monsters.
And as for the crazy night skies, my oh my!
And even Kemal Barrowclough, paleobotanist, could get up and describe some harsh interior landscape enlivened only by the gray-green of lichens, “the first true land plants, because, unlike the psilophytes and lycopods we find clinging to the low moist places, close to water, always looking over their shoulders, so to speak, to make
