Regarding Ducks and Universes (5 page)

As I scanned the nearby posters of upcoming releases for my shared name and finished the last of the lukewarm parsley tea, I wished that Professor Singh hadn’t been
quite
so creative, however.

Having given up on the idea of purchasing a book (there were so many I couldn’t decide on one to buy) I walked out of the Bookworm empty-handed and set a course along quiet Starfish Lane toward busier Lombard Street and the tourist bus depot. As I stepped into the first intersection on the way, a car as sleekly black as—really, nothing in a kitchen except perhaps the inside of a nonstick pan—approached fast, like the driver behind the tinted windows was in an awful hurry, and would have splattered me if I hadn’t jumped back onto the sidewalk at the last moment.

The car continued on its way without slowing down.

“B
est do nothing, citizen.”

“I beg your pardon?” I said.

“You look like you’re trying to decide something. But you must be prudent with your power, citizen. Careless choices create new worlds, thoughtless actions spawn new places, a misstep might be the seed to a new universe—”

I shook my head at the Passivists, who moved on, and eyed the office building across the street from where I was, about to enter the renovated firehouse that served as a tourist bus depot. The office building was one of those rundown, depressing places with peeling paint and neon signs advertising moneylending and such—except for a discreet plaque near the front entrance, which simply read,
Noor & Brood, Investigative Services. Leave It to Us.

The building had tall, narrow windows through which little could be seen. Several cars were parked on a rooftop parking lot.

There had been nothing bearing Felix B’s name in the Bookworm and all its books, which was all well and good. But what if in his computer sat a finished first draft? Or second draft? Or the final version of his masterpiece, ready to be sent out at the touch of a button? It wasn’t like I could knock on his neighbor’s front door—that’s if I managed to find out where my alter lived—and ask, “Is Felix Sayers B writing a cooking-themed mystery, do you happen to know?” Nor could I pretend to be Felix B and glean information by getting together for dinner with his close friends, whoever they were (here I thought of Murphina’s owner and the tangerine-dress woman from the crossing, both of whom had seemed to recognize my face). It wouldn’t have worked either way—I couldn’t pose questions as a stranger because I looked an awful lot like him, nor could I get away with pretending to be Felix B because I probably didn’t look
exactly
like him. Visions of fake mustaches, tinted contact lenses, and wigs flew through my brain, but I ruled them out, for the moment at least, as being undignified and impractical.

Hiring a private detective was something that had simply not occurred to me. Like mustachioed disguises or those other mystery staples, a message written in a strange cipher or a dead body in a locked room, it’s not something that often comes up in real life, at least not in mine.

I watched as a man came out of the office building, glanced around furtively, pocketed an envelope, and hurried away. I hoped he had been there for the moneylending and not as a typical client of Noor & Brood.

The clang of the firehouse bell alerted me to get out of the way as a bus packed with sightseers exited the firehouse behind me and made a wide right turn into traffic. The bus headed down Lombard Street and I went to join the short line already forming at the back of the firehouse. As I waited to buy my ticket for the city tour, I toyed with the idea of hiring Detective Noor (or Detective Brood) to see what he could do for me. Would he take my money, tell me to come back in a few days, and then put his feet up on his desk and take a nap on my dime because there was no alter-surveillance he could do under the law? Or would he laugh me out of his office and call the neighborhood DIM bureau to report me? DIM took its job of protecting citizens’ privacy very seriously, along with their other duties: raiding data black markets; overseeing the destruction of old phonebooks, maps, and other documents; inspecting scientific research centers; and so on.

The next tour wasn’t scheduled to leave for forty minutes. I took it as a sign.

Besides, I reasoned as I headed across the street, what aspiring mystery writer would miss a chance to talk to a real-life detective? If nothing else, I could ask Detective Noor for tips on how to make my fictional sleuth, whose name I hadn’t decided on yet, not come out looking completely amateurish. Tips on police procedure, or how someone stuck in the Sierra Mountains would go about analyzing various types of cigarette ash without having access to a well-stocked lab. That sort of thing.

The detective turned out to be an affable, stout B-dweller who exuded a connectedness to the city and everyone in it, rather like an urban Miss Marple (that is, if Miss Marple had been dark-complexioned, middle-aged, and ran a business in a town that dwarfed the fictional village of St. Mary Mead). I introduced myself and said, “And you are Citizen Noor…or Citizen Brood?”

“Call me Mrs. Noor or Detective Noor. I don’t like all that citizen nonsense.” She offered me a chair and refreshment from a small fridge squeezed under her desk. “This office is my center of operations. Pip, Ham, and Daisy—my two sons and my daughter—do most of the footwork.”

“Lovely nature names,” I said, accepting a glass of water and a cheese ball and taking the chair. Documents and news articles lay strewn across the detective’s desk. Uneven stacks of papers rested against the back wall of the cramped office, and maps and photographs covered most of the available wall space. There was a rack with clothing on it (for disguises?) in one corner.

“And what can we do for you? A lost love, perhaps? A background check on your fiancée?”

“No, nothing like that. Er—”

Mrs. Noor waited a moment for me to speak, then pointed, without turning around, at a brass plaque mounted on the wall behind her. “Up there. Read it to me.”

Feeling like a schoolchild, I read the two-word phrase out loud. “Hypothetically speaking.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that.”

“Hypothetically speaking,” I repeated more loudly.

“Now you can say whatever you like.” She moved a few papers around on her desk and dug up a pen and a tiny plum-colored notebook. “It’s perfectly legal to
say
anything as long as you are not planning on actually doing it. Not wise, perhaps, but legal. You could come in here and suggest that I follow your wife and report on her daily activities—which, if I did it, would be a clear violation of her privacy and Regulation 3. But I would not be obligated to report you for merely suggesting it. If you tried to
pay
me to do it, that’s another matter. Another cheese ball?”

“I’m not married.”

She partook of a cheese ball herself. “It was just an example. I can see that it’s nothing that simple.”

“I was born before Y-day.”

“An alter.” She wiped her hands, uncapped her pen, and opened her notebook to a fresh page. “Tell me.”

Aware that the only person I had chosen to confide in thus far was a complete stranger who was probably out to con me, I told Mrs. Noor, who took notes as I spoke, about the call I had received early one morning about a month ago informing me that my Aunt Henrietta had passed away. From his office in Miami, as I lay in bed making sure my pajamas were buttoned, Aunt Henrietta’s lawyer had said, “To you, her great-nephew, she left her collection of—let me see, here it is—one
half
of her collection of porcelain figurines. Dolphins. Your share is forty-two of them. You can expect them in the mail.”

“How big are they?” I’d asked, a trifle concerned. I remembered Aunt Henrietta’s Florida home as being a sort of museum for all the knickknacks she had acquired during her work abroad. Some of the knickknacks had been quite large.

“Each dolphin is about the size of an orange, I believe, and comes with its own individual stand. She left you something else,” he added.

“Yes?” My hopes raised, I sat up, accidentally knocking the lamp off my bedside table.

“It’s a photograph.”

“A photo—oh.”

“Henrietta generously gave the bulk of her money to charity while she was still alive,” he said, his tone carefully devoid of anything but professionalism. “I’ll send the photograph with the figurines.”

A couple of days later on my doorstep there arrived a large wooden crate in which forty-two dolphin figurines sat carefully packed in bubble wrap. At the very bottom of the crate was a plain manila envelope. In the envelope was a photograph. In the faded photograph was my father, and in his arms was an infant.

Me.

On Y-day, according to the date on the back of the photo. Ten days
before
the official birth date listed on the identicard that I’d carried all my life.

Which meant that I had an alter. Everyone born before Y-day did.

I don’t know why, but the news had hit me like myriad bricks. It’s the kind of thing you expect to find out as a small child from your parents who reassure you lovingly and often that in their eyes you
are
unique and that having an alter is like having a brother or sister, not the kind of thing a grown man expects to hear, along with the news that he is a bit older than he thought. Why my parents had bribed someone to change my birth date, I had no idea. Some digging around had revealed that the true date of my birth was not in January but July, a full six months earlier.

“It was all—a bit of a surprise,” I said to Mrs. Noor. “Why Aunt Hen—my great-aunt, really—why she had a baby photo of me in the first place, I don’t know. She was a relation through marriage, my Uncle Otto’s second wife, and came into the family when I was already at the San Diego Four-Year. None of it makes much sense.” I shook my head.

Mrs. Noor looked at me kindly. “Parents. We do try our best, you know. It’s just that sometimes it’s hard to know what’s best. Take my daughter, Daisy—she likes her work here at Noor & Brood, enjoys the unpredictability of it all, the potpourri of people who walk in here every day. Pip too. But Ham, I’m not so sure. Sometimes I wonder if he’s here only because we’ve kept it a family business. I can’t come out and simply ask, that’s what’s so difficult.”

I couldn’t imagine Mrs. Noor being uncomfortable talking to anyone.

“Perhaps your parents simply wanted to shield you from the knowledge that you had an alter,” she added. “You have to understand what it was like. All the uncertainty, the turmoil we were thrown into after we found out we were connected to another universe. I was a young girl then, just starting in life and in the detective business. And here I am thirty-five years later running my own agency, unlike my alter, who—well, that’s neither here or there.” She sighed and wagged a finger at me. “But your little difficulty, now we can do something about
that
. We’ll begin, of course, by finding out where Felix B lives. That might take some time.
You
live in San Francisco A, but for all we know he might live in the Nevada desert or in an Alaska hunting lodge or in a Carolina greenhouse.”

“The DIM official at the crossing terminal tagged my identicard with an
Alter in the Area
tag.”

“That simplifies matters.” She jotted that down in spidery, Miss-Marple-like handwriting. “And we have the parents’ names, Klara and Patrick Sayers of Carmel, you said? Are your parents still living?”

I shook my head.

“Sorry. What happened, if I may ask?”

“Boating accident.”

“And
his
parents, I wonder? A boating accident is unlikely to have happened in both universes, but you never know.”

“That’s why I’m here. I need you to find out these things for me, Mrs. Noor.”

As she jotted down a few more things, my eyes went to the articles strewn across her desk. The range of topics was wide—I suppose everything is of interest to a detective—and the headlines were just like the ones that sold Universe A newspapers, only printed. There was a large, alarmist one warning that a new disease, something to do with pets, was close to making its way from Universe A into Universe B; a medium-sized one lamented the diminishing numbers of elephants and giraffes; and a small one (often the most useful) gave a positive review to a newly renovated downtown restaurant, the Organic Oven.

“You keep client information in notebooks?” I pointed out the obvious as Mrs. Noor put down her pen.

“My notepad? Entirely the best way. Nothing safer than taking notes in your own handwriting and keeping them in your own pocket.”

“Do you often get clients seeking information about their alters, Mrs. Noor?”

“We get them occasionally.”

“How will you find out more about Felix B? Without incurring the attention of DIM, I mean.” I glanced around. The small, windowless office seemed to harbor many secrets of its own on its shelves and in its corners.

She opened a desk drawer, reached inside, and handed me a business card. “In case you need to contact me, Felix. As for DIM—the laws are here to protect us all, especially citizens whose unscrupulous alters might try to take over their lives, which, as you probably know, is not unheard of. That’s not the case here, of course,” she said, giving me a quick appraising glance. “We merely require some information about Citizen Sayers B, after which you’ll go back to your own universe.”

“You understand, Mrs. Noor, that I don’t want him to know that I know about him?”

“Leave it to us. We will tread lightly.”