asked his father how eyelashes knew when to stop growing. “I only know so much.”
“But you know about this war that hasn’t happened, and you’re telling me about atomic bombs and going to the moon,” Avery protests. “How do you know one thing and not something else?”
“Because some things haven’t been decided yet. Call the toss, Avery.”
“Not until you tell me where I am. Where we are.”
“We aren’t anywhere. For us to be somewhere, you would have to have made a decision. And when you’ve made a decision, I won’t be here. I won’t be anywhere. I only exist in the space of your uncertainty.”
“Who are you, then? Are you God or something?”
The man shakes his head.
“Did God send you? Is there a God? How come He doesn’t decide this instead of leaving it to me?”
Still shaking his head, the man says, “I can’t answer any of those questions. I have told you all I can. You’ve already ensured that Moe Berg will attend Heisenberg’s lecture; now you decide what will happen when he does.”
“No,” Avery says. “All I’m doing is calling a coin toss. I gave you the ball. That was a decision. This isn’t.”
“True. It has to happen this way, though. Conservation of information. I violated causality by telling you what would happen as a result of your last choice. Now you have to choose without knowing, even though I could tell you, so it balances out.” Something flickers on his face, Avery’s father’s face. It looks like guilt.
“What am I deciding?”
“Whether Moe Berg kills Werner Heisenberg.”
“It’s not fair,” Avery says. “That’s why I gave you the ball, so Heisenberg wouldn’t get killed. Stupid German. I should have kept the ball. Why couldn’t I keep the ball and call the toss?”
“I already explained that. Call the toss, Avery. Collapse the wave function,” the man says. “Either it happens or it doesn’t.” “Tails,” Avery says. And it is.
And I am back in Briggs Stadium with Bobby Doerr leading off the fourth inning, and my father holding me up with his scarred welder’s hands. “Avery,” he says. “You okay, son?”
“Yeah, Dad. I’m okay.” I look around at Briggs Stadium, at the worn patches in the outfield, the flakes of rust on the bolts that hold the seats in the concrete floors. I have done something, I realize. It is all the same, but it will be different.
My father looks closely at me, concern in his eyes. “I’m okay, Dad,” I insist.
“Okay, bud,” he says. “That was your last hot dog for the day, though.”
I feel the back of my head. No lump, no sore spot, no nothing. The Tigers lose, there are no home runs hit to left-center, and the next time I read a newspaper article about Moe Berg, it says he hit six home runs over the course of a major-league career that ended in 1939.
And Werner Heisenberg dies in Munich at the ripe old age of seventy-five, and atomic bombs fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Neil Armstrong lands on the moon instead of a man named Yevgeny or Sergei or Yuri.
And my father dies in World War II, on December 11, 1944, when a plane that had recently carried Moe Berg to France crashes in the English Channel.
I was forty-one years old, watching on television from my new house in Farmington Hills, when Neil Armstrong spoke from the surface of the moon. The Tigers had won the World Series the year before, salving the wounds from the ’67 riots that prompted me, like so many other white folks, to leave for the suburbs. I had long since given up on being an astronaut.
My father had been dead for nearly twenty-five years.
Ripples, the man with my father’s face had said. Ripples propagate until they run into something, or until entropy robs them of their energy and they subside back into the flat surface of the water. I caught a ball once, at Briggs Stadium in the summer of 1940, and my father helped me up and said, “Look at you, Avery my boy.”
Look at me, Dad. Briggs Stadium has been Tiger Stadium for thirty-five years now, and the welder’s son from East Detroit became an executive with a custom-built home in the suburbs, and I saved Werner Heisenberg’s life, and maybe I cost you yours.
I sit on the porch of my house in Maine, watching the waves come in and wondering where they come from. I wonder where the still point is, the place where waves are born and decisions hang between heads and tails.
Sometimes I talk to myself. More often I fall asleep and the sea breeze brings me dreams of men who are almost my father.
When I talk to myself, this is the question: If you had called heads, would your father be alive? If Moe Berg had never gone to France with Werner Heisenberg’s life in his hands, a different plane would have been waiting for Dad at the cratered airstrip outside of Lyon.
Would that other plane have crashed?
I was twelve years old. I thought I did the right thing.
Would Moe Berg’s seventh home run have put my father on a different plane?
The cat is alive. The cat is dead.
The Red Sox are playing a twi-night doubleheader tonight. Donna comes outside and sits next to me in the Adirondack chair I built for her the year I retired. She touches me on the back of the neck, then reads in the waning afternoon. I watch the shadow of my chimney crawl down the sloping lawn into the quiet surf, for just this moment content to know where I am, for just this moment content to believe in where I have been. The still point of the turning world. Waves come in like epicycles rippling through the larger cycles of tides, and the moon’s revolution around the Earth, and the Earth’s revolution around the sun.
Coins spinning, waiting for someone to call the toss.
Singleton - GREG EGAN
Looking back at the century that’s just ended, it’s obvious that Australian writer Greg Egan was one of the Big New Names to emerge in SF in the nineties, and is probably one of the most significant talents to enter the field in the last several decades. Already one of the most widely known of all Australian genre writers, Egan may well be the best new “hard-science” writer to enter the field since Greg Bear, and is still growing in range, power, and sophistication. In the last few years, he has become a frequent contributor to Interzone and Asimov’s Science Fiction, and has made sales as well as to Pulphouse, Analog, Aurealis, Eidolon, and elsewhere; many of his stories have also appeared in various “Best of the Year” series, and he was on the Hugo Final Ballot in 1995 for his story “Cocoon,” which won the Ditmar Award and the Asimov’s Readers Award. He won the Hugo Award in 1999 for his novella “Oceanic.” His stories have appeared in our Eighth through Thirteenth, and our Sixteenth through Eighteenth Annual Collections. His first novel, Quarantine, appeared in 1992; his second novel, Permutation City, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1994. His other books include the novels, Distress, Diaspora, and Teranesia, and three collections of his short fiction, Axiomatic, Luminous, and Our Lady of Chernobyl. His most recent book is a major new novel, Schild’s Ladder. He has a Web site at http://www.netspace.net.au/~gregegan/
Suppose that you could ensure that your child was unique… no, really unique. That would be a good thing, wouldn’t it?
Wouldn’t it?
I was walking north along George Street towards Town Hall railway station, pondering the ways I might solve the tricky third question of my linear algebra assignment, when I encountered a small crowd blocking the footpath. I didn’t give much thought to the reason they were standing there; I’d just passed a busy restaurant, and I often saw groups of people gathered outside. But once I’d started to make my way around them, moving into an alley rather than stepping out into the traffic, it became apparent that they were not just diners from a farewell lunch for a
